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The notion that being 'committed' to open source means that a company should give away everything of value is ludicrous. Google came up with great software tha

The notion that being 'committed' to open source means that a company should give away everything of value is ludicrous. Google came up with great software that makes millions of peoples' lives easier, and they have every right to keep it secret and profit off of it. The zealous idea that open source and trade secrets cannot coexist is detrimental to the open source movement as a whole, in my opinion.

rriepe 17y ago
Well put. Almost any good idea taken to its extreme is a bad idea.
- electromagnetic 17y ago
  High taxation eventually reaches communism, if there's benefits like healthcare 'refunded' to the citizen and if there isn't then that ends up being a kleptocracy. Low taxation eventually reaches anarchy as the government is no longer in control. Increasing birth rates enables economies to grow without becoming stagnant and old, placing undue demand due to pensions. An exceptionally high birth rate creates food production problems, housing problems, and generally the 'sardine can' effect. Low birthrates create a stagnant civilization that will eventually reach a tipping point when taxes get so high to pay for pensions that the younger generations will protest. Market freedom to the extreme leads to monopolies taking advantage, 'gentlemen's agreements' between companies to price fix and many other problems that rules and regulations try to control. Equally a controlled market develops problems in and of itself as it's unable to respond naturally to market fluctuations, and quickly becomes unruly and unstable, and as many of the countries who have held long-term controlled markets are testaments to, they develop massive black-market economies to deal with these. The zealous burning of fossil fuels, aside from global warming concerns, can expel vast quantities of radioactive materials, sulfurous emissions and a long list of things we've accepted in western society as being more harmful than smoking to the wide populations health, but rules and regulations on air quality increasingly get more lax (at least they have been where I live). With zero fossil fuel production, however, our civilization would collapse (at least with an immediate stop to production), and I'm not just talking the halting of transportation vehicles, I'm talking the stop in production of the advanced polymers used in virtually all aspects of our lives. The majority of people wouldn't have clothes on their back . . . my wardrobe would certainly be a lot cheaper if my clothes were all genuine cotton and wool. Oh and farewell cheap elasticated sweatpants. Every good idea taken to its extreme is a bad idea and will create monumental problems in its wake. Electric vehicles are amazing, however a pure-electric is a ridiculous prospect in winter when the capacity hits below 60% of room-temperature, suddenly your vehicle can't get you to work and back on a single charge. Zero integration of hybrids is, as everyone knows, damaging to the environment but also an extreme waste of entropy. A 1 tonne vehicle at 100km/h is a massive store of energy, and allowing that to be wasted is criminal, the amount of energy humanity has wasted on braking at highway speeds would likely run the entire human civilization for over a year.
mattmanser 17y ago
I think you're missing the point, the article is pretty much a direct response to: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/meaning-of-open.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/meaning-of-open.html (submitted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1008908 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1008908) In it a Google open source zealot rants wildly about openess being ultimate, apart from search algorithms which should be closed. It also fails to mention all the times open has failed (communism being one of the more spectacular failures of open). A cynic might surmise what they actually mean is content should be open so they can profit from their closed search algorithm.
- jedc 17y ago
  It was written by Jonathan Rosenberg, who's a Senior Vice President for Product Management, and on the top management committee at Google. That doesn't quite meet my personal description of an "open source zealot", though he's clearly quite passionate about it.
- RyanMcGreal 17y ago
  > communism being one of the more spectacular failures of open Wait, what? Communism is a spectacular failure of centralized planning over the entire economy. It has nothing to do with open or closed in principle, and in every implementation it has been aggressively closed in terms of information flows and decision making.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    > Communism is a spectacular failure of centralized planning over the entire economy. Wow, and here I was thinking it was a form of government. Communism in principle has absolutely nothing to do with the flow of information and/or decision making, and its implementations have only very little to do with its basic ideas. A true communistic government has never even been tried, we've only seen a 'new boss same as the old boss' approach to communism with one batch of fat cats replacing another.
    - mbreese 17y ago
allenp 17y ago
Additionally it may be the case that a large part of the value of the algorithm is created from its secrecy. If the algorithm was open it would be trivial to create sites with artificially high rankings which would reduce the value of the search results.
- chollida1 17y ago
  > If the algorithm was open it would be trivial to create sites with artificially high rankings I don't necessarily think this is true. Sites that have high page rank, do so because other sites of high value link to them. Even if Google open sourced their search engine, spam sites would still have a hard time getting high quality inbound links. The reputable and high ranking sites wouldn't have any increased incentive to link to low quality spam sites.
  - DougWebb 17y ago
    It's not the ranking algorithm specifically that's a secret; it's the code that used to detect sites that work together to artificially raise page rank of another site by linking to it. The whole Page Rank algorithm is predicated on the idea that human website owners and contributors do a better job at assessing the value of a website and they express this by linking to the website. When links are created for other reasons they reduce the effectiveness of Page Rank, and when they are created specifically to bias Page Rank they do the most damage to the algorithm's results. Keeping the algorithm secret, and in particular the tweaks that eliminate links which aren't expressing "I judge this to be a good site", keep Page Rank useful.
  - EnderMB 17y ago
    Absolutely. I've worked in several contracted roles within online marketing and I've heard some awful advice from self-proclaimed SEO gurus about how to achieve a high rank for keywords on Google. A lot of what achiving high ranks is about is common sense and as Google improves their algorithm fewer tricks work. Anything past a simple competitive analysis, keyphrase analysis and a backlink analysis on you and your competitors is overkill. The quality of SEO analysts out there is so poor that I believe you could release the source code to Google's entire search engine and people would still get things wrong or believe in ways to get around what I assume is an extremely complex set of mathematically-oriented algorithms. It's a classic example of the blind following the blind, and those that typically have followers are those that are popular for performing SEO work on huge companies that would never actually need it (e.g. Coca Cola).
kvs 17y ago
Agreed. After reading the comments at cdixson.org by the author and reading openness article at Google, it seems like author is simply saying: "I agree they won't open it. But then they should stop talking sactimoniously about openness." which I agree with as well. Here is an interesting perspective: "And millions of websites will have to continue blindly relying on a small group of anonymous engineers in charge of the secret algorithm that determines their fate." Have you ever been delisted by Google? Is there a transparent process to get back on the list? Perhaps transparency is what Google needs the most at the moment.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  > Perhaps transparency is what Google needs the most at the moment. Absolutely, and not only on the search engine part of it, Adwords/Adsense are extremely opaque and as a publisher continuously give you the feeling you're being screwed without any chance to prove that for lack of information.
  - mbreese 17y ago
    As a publisher, couldn't you do some sort of A/B testing with another ad provider? Something like 10% of page views using another set of ads? Or, maybe setup some kind of onclick tracking to verify ad clicks? I don't know what could be done as verification for the advertiser, but the publisher should be able to do something, right?
    - eli 17y ago
      No one else gets enough volume :/
  - zaphar 17y ago
    You say that now but if they provided that transparency then the amount of fraudulent activity would skyrocket. Knowing the details of the algorithms involved does nothing to help you as an advertiser or searcher. Googles extreme impartiality in search and ads is their greatest strength and open sourcing the algorithms involved would do nothing to increase that strength and contribute to a great deal less useful ads and search results on average.
iamelgringo 17y ago
The notion that being 'committed' to open source means that a company should give away everything of value is ludicrous. I disagree with the statement that Google would be giving away everything by opening up page rank. Google's "secret sauce" is hardly page rank alone. Google is really secretive about this stuff, but they arguably have the world's larges corpus of multilingual text in the form of their html index, coupled with the world's largest fault tolerant compute cluster, the largest repository of scanned text,the largest repository of digital video, and probably the largest repository of digital audio in the world. I'm sure that they also have the world's largest repository of people's surfing and searching habits, along with the one of the largest sets of analytics data. Even if page rank, map reduce, GFS, etc.. were open sourced I'm sure they'd still find a way to make billions off of the data that they have. But, I think the larger point that the author makes, is that unlike many giant technology companies (Microsoft, HP, Apple, etc..), Google has made billions off of using open source software. And, while they are a very large supporter of open source, what total percentage of their profits go back to OSS? What percentage of their code gets re-released as open source? These are good questions to ask, and I'd love to hear an open discussion about it.

rriepe 17y ago

Well put. Almost any good idea taken to its extreme is a bad idea.

electromagnetic 17y ago
High taxation eventually reaches communism, if there's benefits like healthcare 'refunded' to the citizen and if there isn't then that ends up being a kleptocracy. Low taxation eventually reaches anarchy as the government is no longer in control. Increasing birth rates enables economies to grow without becoming stagnant and old, placing undue demand due to pensions. An exceptionally high birth rate creates food production problems, housing problems, and generally the 'sardine can' effect. Low birthrates create a stagnant civilization that will eventually reach a tipping point when taxes get so high to pay for pensions that the younger generations will protest. Market freedom to the extreme leads to monopolies taking advantage, 'gentlemen's agreements' between companies to price fix and many other problems that rules and regulations try to control. Equally a controlled market develops problems in and of itself as it's unable to respond naturally to market fluctuations, and quickly becomes unruly and unstable, and as many of the countries who have held long-term controlled markets are testaments to, they develop massive black-market economies to deal with these. The zealous burning of fossil fuels, aside from global warming concerns, can expel vast quantities of radioactive materials, sulfurous emissions and a long list of things we've accepted in western society as being more harmful than smoking to the wide populations health, but rules and regulations on air quality increasingly get more lax (at least they have been where I live). With zero fossil fuel production, however, our civilization would collapse (at least with an immediate stop to production), and I'm not just talking the halting of transportation vehicles, I'm talking the stop in production of the advanced polymers used in virtually all aspects of our lives. The majority of people wouldn't have clothes on their back . . . my wardrobe would certainly be a lot cheaper if my clothes were all genuine cotton and wool. Oh and farewell cheap elasticated sweatpants. Every good idea taken to its extreme is a bad idea and will create monumental problems in its wake. Electric vehicles are amazing, however a pure-electric is a ridiculous prospect in winter when the capacity hits below 60% of room-temperature, suddenly your vehicle can't get you to work and back on a single charge. Zero integration of hybrids is, as everyone knows, damaging to the environment but also an extreme waste of entropy. A 1 tonne vehicle at 100km/h is a massive store of energy, and allowing that to be wasted is criminal, the amount of energy humanity has wasted on braking at highway speeds would likely run the entire human civilization for over a year.

mattmanser 17y ago

I think you're missing the point, the article is pretty much a direct response to: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/meaning-of-open.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/meaning-of-open.html (submitted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1008908 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1008908) In it a Google open source zealot rants wildly about openess being ultimate, apart from search algorithms which should be closed. It also fails to mention all the times open has failed (communism being one of the more spectacular failures of open). A cynic might surmise what they actually mean is content should be open so they can profit from their closed search algorithm.

jedc 17y ago
It was written by Jonathan Rosenberg, who's a Senior Vice President for Product Management, and on the top management committee at Google. That doesn't quite meet my personal description of an "open source zealot", though he's clearly quite passionate about it.
RyanMcGreal 17y ago
> communism being one of the more spectacular failures of open Wait, what? Communism is a spectacular failure of centralized planning over the entire economy. It has nothing to do with open or closed in principle, and in every implementation it has been aggressively closed in terms of information flows and decision making.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  > Communism is a spectacular failure of centralized planning over the entire economy. Wow, and here I was thinking it was a form of government. Communism in principle has absolutely nothing to do with the flow of information and/or decision making, and its implementations have only very little to do with its basic ideas. A true communistic government has never even been tried, we've only seen a 'new boss same as the old boss' approach to communism with one batch of fat cats replacing another.
  - mbreese 17y ago

allenp 17y ago

Additionally it may be the case that a large part of the value of the algorithm is created from its secrecy. If the algorithm was open it would be trivial to create sites with artificially high rankings which would reduce the value of the search results.

chollida1 17y ago
> If the algorithm was open it would be trivial to create sites with artificially high rankings I don't necessarily think this is true. Sites that have high page rank, do so because other sites of high value link to them. Even if Google open sourced their search engine, spam sites would still have a hard time getting high quality inbound links. The reputable and high ranking sites wouldn't have any increased incentive to link to low quality spam sites.
- DougWebb 17y ago
  It's not the ranking algorithm specifically that's a secret; it's the code that used to detect sites that work together to artificially raise page rank of another site by linking to it. The whole Page Rank algorithm is predicated on the idea that human website owners and contributors do a better job at assessing the value of a website and they express this by linking to the website. When links are created for other reasons they reduce the effectiveness of Page Rank, and when they are created specifically to bias Page Rank they do the most damage to the algorithm's results. Keeping the algorithm secret, and in particular the tweaks that eliminate links which aren't expressing "I judge this to be a good site", keep Page Rank useful.
- EnderMB 17y ago
  Absolutely. I've worked in several contracted roles within online marketing and I've heard some awful advice from self-proclaimed SEO gurus about how to achieve a high rank for keywords on Google. A lot of what achiving high ranks is about is common sense and as Google improves their algorithm fewer tricks work. Anything past a simple competitive analysis, keyphrase analysis and a backlink analysis on you and your competitors is overkill. The quality of SEO analysts out there is so poor that I believe you could release the source code to Google's entire search engine and people would still get things wrong or believe in ways to get around what I assume is an extremely complex set of mathematically-oriented algorithms. It's a classic example of the blind following the blind, and those that typically have followers are those that are popular for performing SEO work on huge companies that would never actually need it (e.g. Coca Cola).

kvs 17y ago

Agreed. After reading the comments at cdixson.org by the author and reading openness article at Google, it seems like author is simply saying: "I agree they won't open it. But then they should stop talking sactimoniously about openness." which I agree with as well. Here is an interesting perspective: "And millions of websites will have to continue blindly relying on a small group of anonymous engineers in charge of the secret algorithm that determines their fate." Have you ever been delisted by Google? Is there a transparent process to get back on the list? Perhaps transparency is what Google needs the most at the moment.

jacquesm 17y ago
> Perhaps transparency is what Google needs the most at the moment. Absolutely, and not only on the search engine part of it, Adwords/Adsense are extremely opaque and as a publisher continuously give you the feeling you're being screwed without any chance to prove that for lack of information.
- mbreese 17y ago
  As a publisher, couldn't you do some sort of A/B testing with another ad provider? Something like 10% of page views using another set of ads? Or, maybe setup some kind of onclick tracking to verify ad clicks? I don't know what could be done as verification for the advertiser, but the publisher should be able to do something, right?
  - eli 17y ago
    No one else gets enough volume :/
- zaphar 17y ago
  You say that now but if they provided that transparency then the amount of fraudulent activity would skyrocket. Knowing the details of the algorithms involved does nothing to help you as an advertiser or searcher. Googles extreme impartiality in search and ads is their greatest strength and open sourcing the algorithms involved would do nothing to increase that strength and contribute to a great deal less useful ads and search results on average.

iamelgringo 17y ago

The notion that being 'committed' to open source means that a company should give away everything of value is ludicrous. I disagree with the statement that Google would be giving away everything by opening up page rank. Google's "secret sauce" is hardly page rank alone. Google is really secretive about this stuff, but they arguably have the world's larges corpus of multilingual text in the form of their html index, coupled with the world's largest fault tolerant compute cluster, the largest repository of scanned text,the largest repository of digital video, and probably the largest repository of digital audio in the world. I'm sure that they also have the world's largest repository of people's surfing and searching habits, along with the one of the largest sets of analytics data. Even if page rank, map reduce, GFS, etc.. were open sourced I'm sure they'd still find a way to make billions off of the data that they have. But, I think the larger point that the author makes, is that unlike many giant technology companies (Microsoft, HP, Apple, etc..), Google has made billions off of using open source software. And, while they are a very large supporter of open source, what total percentage of their profits go back to OSS? What percentage of their code gets re-released as open source? These are good questions to ask, and I'd love to hear an open discussion about it.