Seeing through Google’s nontributions

I have been aggravated and annoyed for some time by Google pretending that their use of open source software entitle them to say they contribute. My personal open source contributions rival their entire corporate contribution. Google have some great open source developers working for them – on closed source software. But Google do not contribute significantly to open source. Indeed by ignoring Linux in many of their intiatives they threaten it.

So it was with some pleasure that I happened along a blog entry by Navaneeth Krishnan on his attendance at FOSS in India. It is reproduced below.


http://weblogs.java.net/blog/navaneeth/archive/2005/11/fossin_intel_go_1.html


2:30 pm
“Google and Open Source” by Zaheda Bhorat begins. The whole Google thing looks like a recruitment and PR drive. They have a “We are hiring” caption right in their presentation slide. Google’s contribution to open source is that they run on Linux. I wonder if that’s Google’s contribution to Linux or Linux’s contribution to Google. And of course it seems they have open source examples of how to use the Google API.

The next 30 minutes is about the Google Summer of Code. Zaheda discusses how the whole stuff works and how successful the program was. She then gets a student on stage who shares his experiences being a participant in the Summer of Code. I hear him say “Thank you google” at least thrice.

By Greg Luck

As Terracotta’s CTO, Greg (@gregrluck) is entrusted with understanding market and technology forces and the business drivers that impact Terracotta’s product innovation and customer success. He helps shape company and technology strategy and designs many of the features in Terracotta’s products. Greg came to Terracotta on the acquisition of the popular caching project Ehcache which he founded in 2003. Prior to joining Terracotta, Greg served as Chief Architect at Australian online travel giant Wotif.com. He also served as a lead consultant for ThoughtWorks on accounts in the United States and Australia, was CIO at Virgin Blue, Tempo Services, Stamford Hotels and Resorts and Australian Resorts and spent seven years as a Chartered Accountant in KPMG’s small business and insolvency divisions. He is a regular speaker at conferences and contributor of articles to the technical press.

2 comments

  1. Individuals at google contribute, and with google’s blessing and (not infrequently) funding. Just from the people I know personally, not by reputation, I’d have a lot of trouble beieving that you alone outproduce them. The most certainly do contribute, they just do it the right way for the most part — through individuals, not marketing campaigns.

  2. Brian,
    I agree it is hard to belive. I contribute to 5 open source projects. Google as a corporation has 9 projects. See http://code.google.com/projects.html. That is what I mean by rival. Google’s project are not widely used, so far as I know. My projects are. That is also what I mean.
    Other companies, like Sun, really do make the world a better place with their open source contributions. Yet Google has a reputation for being a great open source contributor. I think this is very unfair.
    I would not be annoyed at all if Google did not play this opensource card. To me it is a cynical recruiting pitch.
    My comments are not about personal Googlers. I know quite a few people who work there and are great open source contributors. Personally that is.

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