This is an important point that people need to keep in mind. From a psychological perspective it is also a little bit evil in that it "feels" like a community a

This is an important point that people need to keep in mind. From a psychological perspective it is also a little bit evil in that it "feels" like a community and people participate like its a community, but the reality is that it isn't a community at all in the communal action sense. Essentially Google gets "free" developer time as people work on problems and pitch in possible solutions. Google can influence what is worked on by whining about things, and they are free to take or discard the offerings. This isn't particularly surprising to me as it feels very similar to the way I felt when working there. Which is that people in engineering worked on projects that they were passionate about, but whether or not those projects got support, or were shipped, or released into products. That stuff was all done "elsewhere" by some group of people who were generally known, but not really part of the day to day. I tended to think cynically of them as 'class A' shareholders, or 'class B' shareholders[1]. I don't think there is anything wrong with managing a program this way, I do however think they go out of their way to create a community illusion to foster more participation. That tells me that if they were up front about things, they feel people might not be as eager to participate. To the extent that they are deceptive in their communications, that I would consider wrong. [1] Class B shareholders get to vote on shareholder issues, but there is always more voting power in the class A shares so that the class A folks can veto or reject any notion they dislike, no matter how popular with the class B folks.