Having spent 7 years working in the Ubuntu community and another 5 now at Google, it's striking to me how Google is internally similar to an open source project

Having spent 7 years working in the Ubuntu community and another 5 now at Google, it's striking to me how Google is internally similar to an open source project. It's not uncommon to send patches to completely different teams because you need something to work a little bit differently. Or even just because you were there and noticed something fixable and are being a good citizen. Some parts of the code are nearly abandoned and destaffed, but might still have some users wishing that weren't so. And some parts of the code are only used/improved by a very specific group of people. Some of this is technology (the monorepo, lots of good infrastructure to base things off of), some of it is management (such as recognizing/rewarding contributions that have "wider impact"), some of it is culture (a lot of Googlers come from or still work in open source).