Google About Openness 283
sopssa writes "Several sites, including TechCrunch and The Register, are reporting about an email Google's VP Jonathan Rosenberg sent to employees on Monday about the meaning of open. 'At Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value, and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant, profitable, and competitive ecosystem for businesses. ... Our goal is to keep the Internet open, which promotes choice and competition and keeps users and developers from getting locked in.' But are we likely to see Google open their search engine, advertising or the famous back-end system? In their words, that would mean Google and other companies would need to work harder and innovate more to keep their users, for everyone's benefit."
Say they do... (Score:1, Informative)
Say Google opened up their search and advertising code. The result? Very little would change about the internet.
The massive hardware deployment that is at the heart of Google isn't going to be open, so only a few companies would have any real chance of utilizing their search code in a way that would compete with them. Same for Advertising (except you also have to have the monetary infrastructure for dealing with all of the customers and payments that take place). So maybe Microsoft, Yahoo!, and a few more companies would see some benefit from being able to pick the brain of the prime Google properties. The rest of the web would probably see some improvements in site searches, but probably no better than you get searching a specific site using Google today.
The biggest benefit would easily be non-web websites such as internal sites. These can probably already benefit for a reasonable cost through Google's search appliances, though.
open as long as its google (Score:1, Informative)
After using Wave preview for the past couple months, I don't think I like where Google is heading.
There is a lot of good and a lot of bad.
GWT so far is bad. Development of the compiler is slow and forces developers to target specific supported browsers. So far none of which except Google's own Chrome are well supported. Wave preview in any other browser than Chrome is horrendously slow and crashes regularly. Besides, who wants to go back to the mid-90s and have to put warnings on their site, "This site optimized for Chrome at 1900x1080"?
Yet they do contribute to a lot of open source projects and have made a number of their projects open source themselves.
This sounds more like idealism than anything. Their company is too big for any one stake-holder to steer the ship towards a single goal or at least navigate by certain guiding principles.
So to sum up, "meh."
Re:Typical proprietary bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
We want systems to be open, so that we can freely use them, but we will keep our own system proprietary. Where Google makes Open Source, it does so to disrupt other people's business, so that Google can continue to use open infrastructure. Sure, it's good business sense, but spare us the "we are the good guys" bullshit.
How about you RTFA, oh yea this is Slashdot. Perhaps I have fallen hook line and sinker, but I think their actions speak louder than their words, and their words are merely clarification, which is spoken on as well. Since you are not likely to read it, allow me to quote:
"While we are committed to opening the code for our developer tools, not all Google products are open source. Our goal is to keep the Internet open, which promotes choice and competition and keeps users and developers from getting locked in. In many cases, most notably our search and ads products, opening up the code would not contribute to these goals and would actually hurt users. The search and advertising markets are already highly competitive with very low switching costs, so users and advertisers already have plenty of choice and are not locked in. Not to mention the fact that opening up these systems would allow people to "game" our algorithms to manipulate search and ads quality rankings, reducing our quality for everyone.
So as you are building your product or adding new features, stop and ask yourself: Would open sourcing this code promote the open Internet? Would it spur greater user, advertiser, and partner choice? Would it lead to greater competition and innovation? If so, then you should make it open source. And when you do, do it right; don't just push it over the wall into the public realm and forget about it. Make sure you have the resources to pay attention to the code and foster developer engagement. Google Web Toolkit, where we have developed in the open and used a public bug tracker and source control system, is a good example of this."
Re:Answer is in TFA (Score:3, Informative)
From the OP:
.' But are we likely to see Google open their search engine, advertising or the famous back-end system?
No, actually, we aren't. The email says [blogspot.com] so, in the fourth paragraph under Open Technology > Open Source:
Don't you love it when the submitter doesn't even read the article in question? Get mad all you want, yes I am looking at you CmdrTaco. You may not have submitted it, but you green-lit it.
Re:Data liberation (Score:4, Informative)
They, in this case, being the author of the article and not Google...
Re:Typical proprietary bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
The only thing I think Google is missing is a way to export all your Google information into a data file you can upload into someone else (or a way to give someone a "key" to your information to side load it)
If you read the article, they would agree with you. How do you like that? They are working on it and accomplished much already, but working toward more. See the Data Liberation Front [slashdot.org] (dataliberation.org)
Re:Typical proprietary bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
The OSS code bases for the Chrome browser and Chrome OS are both called Chromium. You can do anything you want with the code basically, because it is under a BSD license.
Chrome however is a trademark. Calling you release Chrome means meeting certain standards. As you noted, Mozilla doesn't allow official branding of unofficial builds.
Are you going to say that Firefox isn't OSS because they have branding standards for what they call an official release?
Last time I checked, Red Hat also has the same policies on branding, hence CentOS. Are you also going to suggest that Red Hat and Linux aren't OSS?
Google conflicted on being a post-scarcity place (Score:3, Informative)
As I wrote about here, inspired by the Virgle April fools joke, I see Google as being conflicted about its identity in a world that could provide abundance for everyone if we made a post-scarcity ideological shift, but which currently does not because a scarcity ideology is still dominant: :-). And that jest came almost half a *century* after the "Triple Revolution" letter of 1964 about the growing disconnect between effort and productivity (or work and financial fitness): :-) As with my mother, no doubt Googlers have lived through periods of scarcity of money relative to their needs to survive or be independent scholars or effective agents of change. Is it any wonder they probably think being financially obese is a *good* thing, not an indication of either personal or societal pathology? :-( ... :-). Or a failure to be able to define "enough" and move beyond a fear of becoming poor. And the millionaires I've known or heard of who became suddenly wealthy generally are suddenly adrift in a life that has not prepared them for thinking about deep questions like what their values and priorities really are and why -- and working through that takes time which they often don't have as money runs away from them spent on trivialities of "their stillborn adult lives". And the stable millionaires who have slowly earned their wealth are often so enmeshed in the current order of things to make it hard to see beyond it (a current order which they may well have genuinely and sincerely tried to make better, like at Google, and even succeeded at doing so to an extent, within the bounds of Empire.) ...
"A Rant On Financial Obesity and an Ironic Disclosure "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html [pdfernhout.net]
"""
Look at Project Virgle and "An Open Source Planet":
http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html [google.com]
Even just in jest some of the most financially obese people on the planet (who have built their company with thousands of servers all running GNU/Linux free software) apparently could not see any other possibility but seriously becoming even more financially obese off the free work of others on another planet (as well as saddling others with financial obesity too
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm [educationa...ocracy.org]
Even not having completed their PhDs, the top Google-ites may well take many more *decades* to shake off that ideological discipline. I know it took me decades (and I am still only part way there.
The fact is, there are far more than six *million* millionaire families in the USA who would never have to "work" another day in their lives if they were frugal (and so could work full time on space settlement or other worthwhile charitable free ends).
http://www.dba-oracle.com/t_billionaire_next_door.htm [dba-oracle.com]
There must just be a failure of imagination that keeps them from it. Or an excess of a certain capitalist religion shown on a libertarian-leaning college mailing list I am on (and usually disagreeing
Maybe the millionaires and billionaires and trillionaires (governments) out there should think on Spock's choice as capitalistic and militaristic irrational exuberance starts reentering the stratosphere (wars over food, water, arms, climate, and oil profits, and yes, blowback from terrorism).
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=globalization+blowback [google.com]
And actually do something besides compete and mak