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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.
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.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
This is a brilliant idea!
I vote they name it "Google Labs"...