Google Launches New Website To Showcase Its Open Source Projects and Processes (betanews.com)

BrianFagioli writes: Google is an essential member of the open source community. The search giant contributes some really great projects, offering code to be used many -- it claims more than 2,000 such contributions! Heck, the company even hosts the annual Summer of Code program, where it pairs students with open source projects teams. In other words, Google is helping to get young folks excited about open source. Today, Google announced that it is launching an all-new website to focus on open source. It is not a general open source site, but a destination to learn more about the search-giant's relationship with it. "Today, we're launching opensource.google.com, a new website for Google Open Source that ties together all of our initiatives with information on how we use, release, and support open source. This new site showcases the breadth and depth of our love for open source. It will contain the expected things: our programs, organizations we support, and a comprehensive list of open source projects we've released. But it also contains something unexpected: a look under the hood at how we 'do' open source," says Will Norris, Open Source Programs Office, Google.

Comments

How Google does Open Source

[drinkypoo]

1) Start hosting open source projects for free
2) Stop hosting open source projects for free
3) Profit!

Re:How Google does Open Source

[Tough Love]

Wow, what an annoying front end. I don't want to see bouncy balls and random projects, I want some kind of rational, useful view, perhaps by popularity, contribution rate, dependent projects? Something that does not scream PR. Something that does not scream style over substance. As PR, this just reminds of Google's sad record of trying to force its anti-copyleft views on the community. So far, every random project that popped up is Apache-licensed. Hey Google, Apache may be your favourite license, it is not necessarily ours. Looks like the same arrogant people running this PR effort as Google's previous abandonware project hosting. At least they seem to have stopped beating the dead Subversion horse, that is at least something. All the random projects that popped up for me point at Github.

If this page is indicative of how Google "does" open source, then Google has serious issues "doing" open source. Maybe Google should be less concerned about "doing" open source and more about participating in it.

Re:How Google does Open Source

[haruchai]

Click the grid View button on the upper right

Re:How Google does Open Source

[Tough Love]

Click the grid View button on the upper right

Already did. Another lame view, what is it trying to be, pretty on a 4 inch handset? Why does it waste so much screen space, just to show a title, short description and icon? Continues the theme of form over function. Where is a simple list of all projects, one per line? That should be the base functionality, then shovel on the shiny, if you must. Or not. The kind of person who matters to this site doesn't want shiny, they want deep and functional. Take a look at Github if that isn't clear.

Re:How Google does Open Source

[alantus]

Right, click the grid view, then click on "Load more" about 30 times.

Re:How Google does Open Source

[haruchai]

Or you can also filter by Category and Language

Re:How Google does Open Source

[trawg]

While I don't disagree with you (I hate fancy pants websites as much as the next nerd that just wants a plain text list of things), I'd note two things:

1) There's a 'grid view' option at the top right of the list of projects that provides a simple interface to view the list. It's still not as good as a simple table list but it's better than the weird mess that you get by default.

2) I have to wonder if part of the reason for this is to intentionally make it the sort of flashy shit that appeals to less nerdy more mainstream types (CxOs who want to see pretty colours and animations). Open source still has a reputation as ugly, scruffy, immature, etc (we can argue about whether that is deserved or not all day), and this approach makes it a little more slick.

Perfectly willing to agree this is annoying. I want a table list. But if it helps people take a look at open source with fresh new eyes maybe it isn't all bad?

Re:How Google does Open Source

[Big Hairy Ian]

Agreed even the grid view is hard to navigate it's all show and no substance

Re:How Google does Open Source

[Tough Love]

Message not received.

Re: Rofl

[subk]

Self-masterbatory

Isn't that kind of redundant?

3/29/18 google shuts open source website down

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoops we did it again. You started to trust us and we decided to shut another service down. Sorry?

Re: Rofl

[Tough Love]

Self-masterbatory

Isn't that kind of redundant?

As opposed to mutual-masterbatory.

This is a brilliant idea!

[tlambert]

This is a brilliant idea!

I vote they name it "Google Labs"...

Re: Rofl

[haruchai]

Self-masterbatory

Isn't that kind of redundant?

It was redundant before you changed the spelling

Re:front-end GUI is crap

[haruchai]

It could be better but there are 2 filters you can use to cut down on the number of squares shown.
There's the Filter Languages so you can show only the projects written in, for example, Go and the arrow to the right of the Search field to pick a category.
So if you filter on Rust and choose Utilities for the category, it shows only Bazel and the Hat Backup System, whatever the hell those are.

Re:front-end GUI is crap

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, I've seen it; and it's almost useless

I wanted to (and I did it) check a description of every project and since there was no show all projects button/link I had to browse every category one by one, seeing the same projects over and over again since almost all are tagged with many categories -the GUI is non-sense.

Whoever put this crap online lost many many hours "designing" the GUI/style/javascripts/css ... al those man hours could have been better used writing detailed summaries for each project with a barebones interface; in the end, we're programmers, we don't like bouncing balls and non-sense animations on documentation pages.

Say one thing, do another

[BigBrownChunx]

I have a few buddies who work at Google but are in total fear of losing their jobs by contributing to open source projects. On the surface everything seems fine and everyone is super helpful until you hunt down the one person at Google who is the expert and then everything goes silent because they don't want to rock the boat.

Re:Say one thing, do another

[wnorris]

Our process for patching external projects is pretty straightforward (https://opensource.google.com/docs/patching/). Tell your buddies to contact me (they can look me up in our internal directory) and I can try to help address their concerns. -Will Norris

Re:front-end GUI is crap

[telchine]

What do they think the target audience is ? Do they intend to sell Nike shoes ?

Yup, hideous UI. whats wrong with a list?

Damage Control

[ilsaloving]

This all smacks of attempts at damage control to me. They're being attacked left and right (both figuratively and politically), and their "stick our fingers in our ears" defence isn't working anymore.

So now they're all, "But... but... look at all the good we're doing!", hoping we'll ignore the fact that they kill off projects as fast as they put them out, and generally can't be trusted with anything that needs to last more than 6 months.

Re:Damage Control

[ilsaloving]

I wish you could mod on the same discussion you post in. I would give this a +1 interesting.

bugs

[Andrey_Karpov]

Well, now PVS-Studio has more code to check and to entertain the readers with reports. :) About the analysis of various open source projects by PVS-Studio Team: https://www.viva64.com/en/insp...