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> The article talks about the decision to open source Kubernetes as some sort of decision for the betterment of the world. I've never liked that Google feels t

> The article talks about the decision to open source Kubernetes as some sort of decision for the betterment of the world. I've never liked that Google feels the need to couch everything in making the world better. Their open source strategy has mainly been strategic business moves to stop competitive threats. Android was about stopping Apple from dominating mobile OSs. Kubernetes was about stopping AWS from dominating cloud. TensorFlow was about making sure Nvidia didn't dominate deep learning.

stingraycharles 8y ago
This is precisely on point and is a proven strategy for Google. Chrome is another example. Almost all their big open source projects are to mitigate existing threats, and it’s working out very well for them. It’s annoying to see them trying to frame it as a “public service”, but guess that’s how to do proper PR.
xapata 8y ago
Google purchased Android before the iPhone was created. I agree that open source is good business, but some of the causes you listed aren't the whole story. Also, they learned a lesson from Hadoop. If they'd open-sourced Google MapReduce, the cloud industry might look very different.
tangentspace 8y ago
I don't get any odd vibe like that from this article. They are pretty upfront about the business motivations in this post: > with the launch of our Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform Google Compute Engine, we noticed an interesting problem: customers were paying for a lot of CPUs, but their utilization rates were extremely low because they were running VMs. We knew we had an internal solution for this. Later, > most importantly, we were able to work with lots of great engineers, many of whom really understood the needs of businesses who would benefit from deploying containers That does not read like a decision to pursue this for the betterment of the world. It sounds like a decision to pursue this for the betterment of their customers. That's capitalism, not benevolence, and they're pretty transparent about it.

stingraycharles 8y ago

This is precisely on point and is a proven strategy for Google. Chrome is another example. Almost all their big open source projects are to mitigate existing threats, and it’s working out very well for them. It’s annoying to see them trying to frame it as a “public service”, but guess that’s how to do proper PR.

xapata 8y ago

Google purchased Android before the iPhone was created. I agree that open source is good business, but some of the causes you listed aren't the whole story. Also, they learned a lesson from Hadoop. If they'd open-sourced Google MapReduce, the cloud industry might look very different.

tangentspace 8y ago

I don't get any odd vibe like that from this article. They are pretty upfront about the business motivations in this post: > with the launch of our Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform Google Compute Engine, we noticed an interesting problem: customers were paying for a lot of CPUs, but their utilization rates were extremely low because they were running VMs. We knew we had an internal solution for this. Later, > most importantly, we were able to work with lots of great engineers, many of whom really understood the needs of businesses who would benefit from deploying containers That does not read like a decision to pursue this for the betterment of the world. It sounds like a decision to pursue this for the betterment of their customers. That's capitalism, not benevolence, and they're pretty transparent about it.