You have a good point. By open sourcing TensorFlow, Google will benefit from innovations contributed by the community at large. Machine learning frameworks are

You have a good point. By open sourcing TensorFlow, Google will benefit from innovations contributed by the community at large. Machine learning frameworks are now commodity software. I give my point about this in a blog post titled "TensorFlow is commodity software" http://blog.eriksen.com.br/en/tensorflow-commodity-software http://blog.eriksen.com.br/en/tensorflow-commodity-software (HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10574444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10574444) You last phrase is right too: Google built a massive infrastructure because it had Google File System, BigTable and MapReduce. Hadoop, inspired by the published papers, turned into a more sophisticated software (an ex-Google engineer said that, but other Googlers denying his claims) and grown into a big ecosystem of products and services. But while Hadoop was matching the feature set of Google's proprietary implementations, Google was getting even bigger.