Post "Good Google," Who Will Defend the Open Web?

psykocrime writes "The crazy kids at Fogbeam Labs have started a discussion about Google and their relationship with the Open Web, and questioning who will step up to defend these principles, even as Google seem to be abdicating their position as such a champion. Some candidates mentioned include Yahoo, IBM, Red Hat, Mozilla, Microsoft and The Wikimedia Foundation, among others. The question is, what organization(s) have both the necessary clout and the required ethical principles, to truly champion the Open Web, in the face of commercial efforts which are clearly inimical to Open Source, Open Standards, Libre Culture and other elements of an Open Web?"

Comments

Re:Like Politics

[Looker_Device]

The EFF has been pretty consistent over the years. Perhaps they lack the clout, but they certainly have remained pretty steadfast for a long time now.

Re:Like Politics

[Zeromous]

Companies always act in their own interests, it's just that some are more ethical than others.

Why do we need a Champion, when we could have a Hall of Heroes?

Wikimedia hath no clout?

[WGFCrafty]

Those who say Wikimedia is powerless, I completely disagree. They're a non-profit concerned with sharing the largest quantity of the most accurate knowledge with the most people. They control several of the most popular websites on earth with few commercial interests and have representatives in MANY languages.

Their largest subset (or was it them too? wp and wm?) also showed their willingness to shutdown completely for a day to demonstrate principles. Google would have taken quite a hit monetarily if they completely shut down (they just posted links and warnings).

Re:Duh

[oGMo]

Anybody who reads the news and is paying attention to what has been going on lately realizes that Google has changed. Are they completely "evil" now? No, but it's quite clear that openness is less important to them than in the past.

I don't think this is really that much different. Mostly in that Google was never particularly open. They just happen to have finally killed a service that people actually care about (vs like Wave or Buzz or even iGoogle) in their Ahab-like (or Quixotic, depending on your view) pursuit of G+.

They've all but declared war on RSS, they never implemented OpenSocial in Google+, G+ doesn't support any of a whole raft of standards that you'd use when building a social network if you cared about openness, Android has *never* really be developed in the open... it's "open source" but Google do everything and then throw code over the wall to the world.

They never cared about RSS and it's obvious Reader was never anything but a back-shelf product people happened to like, because, well, Google. None of their (major) products have been developed "in the open"; the fact you can even get the source to Android is quite something. Where's the open development (or source code) for Web Search, Gmail, G+, calendar, etc? Locked up tight. Don't idealize Google; they were never an "open source" company.

But the point is that there is a pattern present, where Google are showing less and less interest in Open Web principles.

Screw the web. If you want to beat Google, don't do it on their playground. It's not even a very good one.

Who owns Fogbeam Labs, anyway?

I do, along with my cofounders.

Then it's very disingenuous of you to post the article as if you were a third party when you are not.