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While I generally believe in Google's altruism in their open source contributions, that good faith does not carry forward to any of their open source initiative

While I generally believe in Google's altruism in their open source contributions, that good faith does not carry forward to any of their open source initiatives when it comes to Google Cloud. Maybe I'm cynical, but it seems pretty obvious to me that Google embraces OSS with Istio, Kubernetes, etc only out of necessity and being a distant 3rd in the Cloud race, and this is their attempt at some sort of differentiator.

ehsankia 6y ago
I don't understand why everything any company does has to either be 100% altruistic or 100% out of greed. Why can't there be a middle ground? Obviously they see the value of open source, especially with projects like TensorFlow, but at the same time, after having spent so much resources developing these, they still want to reserve some control so that their investment can stay useful and agile to their needs. That seems reasonable, and it's not readily obvious that open-governance is the best solution for every project.
- duxup 6y ago
  >I don't understand why everything any company does has to either be 100% altruistic or 100% out of greed. With all discourse on the internet IMO there's way too much all one thing or another. Companies and people made lots of decisions surrounding various projects, and the reasons can be altruistic one day, about profit the next, or a little of both with the same decision.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  There is no such thing as corporate altruism. It is all greed. For all companies. When a company open sources something, you're right, they "see the value of open source". They know it will enable collaboration, essentially unpaid labor on their project, community and interest, and while others can use it, it places them at the center in a driving power position over the technology and gives them the ability to set the standard. Open sourcing is good business. And that's before we talk about the marketing value of claiming it's altruistic and selling that idea to everyone else. Once you start taking advantage of people's naivety to promote your company and your brand, you're really cooking with gas. People need to stop believing in corporations, because corporations are built for the purpose of making money. You can trust them insofar as you understand that goal and understand them to move in accordance with it.
  - cromwellian 6y ago
    Not everything open sourced is a corporate decision. Frankly, a lot of employees have 20% pet projects, and smaller open source projects tend to be engineers pet projects and the individuals releasing them tend to not care about the business use case, they tend to want to share and show what they have written to the external community. And having worked on Google OSS projects, the 'unpaid labor' aspect often doesn't materialize. Looking at GWT , J2CL, Closure Compiler for example, 99% of all commits are from Googlers, very few outside contributions, despite for example, a peak of 150k MAUs for GWT in its heyday. Google has 10s of thousands of OSS projects, only a small fraction of them are related to any kind of strategy. Most are people scratching an itch and throwing a codebomb over the wall onto GH.
    - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
      But even your 20% pet projects are allowed to be done and open sourced as a point of retaining employees, which is viewed as a perk that presumably provides the company value. If Google didn't think 20% projects provided value in terms of employee satisfaction and retention, or didn't find some value in the ability to potentially build on some of that random unplanned R&D if someone struck gold, Google wouldn't do it. It's possible to have altruistic line employees, but corporations are always acting on cost/benefit. That benefit just doesn't always manifest directly into cash. Employee retention, good PR, etc. are all benefits that can be to some degree valued and measured.
      - cromwellian 6y ago
        You attribute too much to management, as if everything not expressly forbidden is omitted for a reason. Corporations do not have 100% visibility into what their employees are doing in totality and they often don't write any rules for or against something until after an employee does something so bad it creates negative PR. There's no employee handbook rule that tells me I can comment on HackerNews, or tells me that I can't (well, I hope not). So until I get a call from Google HR telling me I did something bad on HN, I do it. I don't think this is Google specific, I don't think the vast majority of employees in the tech sector obtain permission for both after hours contributions they make on the internet, or even stuff they do while at work, even though most companies have a policy not to use work computers for personal things. People just don't compartmentalize their lives like that. Like say you're at the office, you're browsing some GitHub repo on a project completely unrelated to your company, and you notice an easy to fix bug, and send in a PR on your work desktop while at the office. Is your company allowing you to do this explicitly, or do they just not care, as long as you're being responsible and not spending all day at the office working on non-work stuff and not deliverables. The COVID era brings this even more into focus, with everyone working from home now, really, how many people are doing other work during office hours? You're trying too hard to attribute master planning to management, when the truth is, most of these tech companies are more chaotic and autonomous internally then most people realize.
maffydub 6y ago
I suspect Google felt they got burned with Kubernetes - doing a lot of the initial development, donating it to the CNCF and then not profiting much from it (e.g. still being distant 3rd in cloud).
- a012 6y ago
  Do they? I see their GKE and then now with Anthos thingy got a lot of attention.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    What matters is sales, not attention.
    - akoncius 6y ago
      without attention there will be no sales
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        Well it doesn't seem to be working then.
        harpratap 6y ago
        How can you be so certain? The project is barely 6 years old and so many APIs are JUST reaching v1. And companies are still using mostly barebones K8s, we are yet to see how RedHat, Azure differentiate on top of it and we get to see all the "distros"
        pjmlp 6y ago
        By the market position of Amazon and Microsoft versus what Google keeps trying to do, and there are enough candidates for that 3rd place.
johannes1234321 6y ago
I don't see altruism, but alignment of different interests. Summer of Code is a huge project they finance, seems altruistic but is a recruiting&marketing tool. Publishing libraries like protobuf and abseil serves to drive standards in directions they like. Chrome/Chromium drives the open web, ensures their say on standards and gives the ability to set them. Android/AOSP brings leadership in mobile devices to them. Again driving standards to their needs and preventing Apple from making the mobile world a google-free walked garden. SDKs for their services - obvious. And to be clear, that is by no means bad. And that potential abuse of their position has to be controlled (i.e. when setting web standards to their likings) is mostly independent from their software being open or not.
- polskibus 6y ago
  Moats, moats everywhere.
- jononor 6y ago
  Some open source projects might also be (partially) for employee retention. Letting some high-performing developer(s) open source internally developed projects because it is what they want to do. Might be particularly relevant for developer tooling where commercial potential is generally quite low.
- solarkraft 6y ago
  > Publishing libraries like protobuf and abseil serves to drive standards in directions they like. Could you elaborate on why they care? Do they have some kind of competitive advantage when it comes to Protobuf?
  - johannes1234321 6y ago
    For abseil this is a bit simpler, so I start there: On the one hand it is a library they publish so that other libraries they publish (Googletest, protobuf, ..) can use it on the other hand it drives development of the C++ standard and adoption according to their needs ("see our hashmap is faster and more efficient, make it part of the standard! (Then we don't have to maintain it anymore, but compiler vendors will)") With things like protobuf/grcp it's a bit harder, but if they define the standard for data exchange between machines they can eventually - use it as apart of their search indexer - incorporate external services into their products while keeping their standard architecture - integrate acquired software into their stack (you hope being acquired by google? Prepare ;) ) - it reduces risk of alternative approaches from becoming defaults, which could harm Google's integration wishes - if job candidates are used to protobuf there is one thing less to reach a new hire This certainly isn't a conclusive list, and I can't judge relevance of each for their decision, but those things certainly impact the decision aside from "we think it's cool"
dmantis 6y ago
Altruism or not - it's a very bad idea to handle rights over open-source trademarks by one US-based organization due to aggressive political interventions from the gov: e.g. gitlab case with discrimination over russian/chinese hires, case with github removing Iran accounts, etc. Open-source should be extensively distributed over many actors to prevent any government censorship and attacks by political reasons.
- lmz 6y ago
  None of those cases have anything to do with trademarks. Infrastructure/economic control maybe, but not trademarks.
tw04 6y ago
Given it's run by someone from Oracle, skepticism/cynicism is warranted.
naringas 6y ago
There's something of the older BSD/Unix engeineering culture all through google's technical sutff. It's noticable through their documentaion and in some of their architectural decisions and general approach/attitude towards software engineering. I've have noticed that it's faded somewhat but it's still there, it's noticable specially when contrasting it with Amazon's approach which has a different approach or style to it. I think it has to do with the origins of older google engineers (this also would explain why/how it's diluted but still there) Also it seems that in some parts of google are trying to move away from these in order to be seem more enterprise friendly? But personally, I really like google's more engineer-oriented attitude (here are they pieces and how they are made, you can figure it out) versus a more hand-holding style which later makes it difficult to move beyond the happy path. it's not very easy to explain what I mean exactly as it all comes from a rather vague sensation about engineering style.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I guess you don't have much experience with Android development.

ehsankia 6y ago

I don't understand why everything any company does has to either be 100% altruistic or 100% out of greed. Why can't there be a middle ground? Obviously they see the value of open source, especially with projects like TensorFlow, but at the same time, after having spent so much resources developing these, they still want to reserve some control so that their investment can stay useful and agile to their needs. That seems reasonable, and it's not readily obvious that open-governance is the best solution for every project.

duxup 6y ago
>I don't understand why everything any company does has to either be 100% altruistic or 100% out of greed. With all discourse on the internet IMO there's way too much all one thing or another. Companies and people made lots of decisions surrounding various projects, and the reasons can be altruistic one day, about profit the next, or a little of both with the same decision.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
There is no such thing as corporate altruism. It is all greed. For all companies. When a company open sources something, you're right, they "see the value of open source". They know it will enable collaboration, essentially unpaid labor on their project, community and interest, and while others can use it, it places them at the center in a driving power position over the technology and gives them the ability to set the standard. Open sourcing is good business. And that's before we talk about the marketing value of claiming it's altruistic and selling that idea to everyone else. Once you start taking advantage of people's naivety to promote your company and your brand, you're really cooking with gas. People need to stop believing in corporations, because corporations are built for the purpose of making money. You can trust them insofar as you understand that goal and understand them to move in accordance with it.
- cromwellian 6y ago
  Not everything open sourced is a corporate decision. Frankly, a lot of employees have 20% pet projects, and smaller open source projects tend to be engineers pet projects and the individuals releasing them tend to not care about the business use case, they tend to want to share and show what they have written to the external community. And having worked on Google OSS projects, the 'unpaid labor' aspect often doesn't materialize. Looking at GWT , J2CL, Closure Compiler for example, 99% of all commits are from Googlers, very few outside contributions, despite for example, a peak of 150k MAUs for GWT in its heyday. Google has 10s of thousands of OSS projects, only a small fraction of them are related to any kind of strategy. Most are people scratching an itch and throwing a codebomb over the wall onto GH.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    But even your 20% pet projects are allowed to be done and open sourced as a point of retaining employees, which is viewed as a perk that presumably provides the company value. If Google didn't think 20% projects provided value in terms of employee satisfaction and retention, or didn't find some value in the ability to potentially build on some of that random unplanned R&D if someone struck gold, Google wouldn't do it. It's possible to have altruistic line employees, but corporations are always acting on cost/benefit. That benefit just doesn't always manifest directly into cash. Employee retention, good PR, etc. are all benefits that can be to some degree valued and measured.
    - cromwellian 6y ago
      You attribute too much to management, as if everything not expressly forbidden is omitted for a reason. Corporations do not have 100% visibility into what their employees are doing in totality and they often don't write any rules for or against something until after an employee does something so bad it creates negative PR. There's no employee handbook rule that tells me I can comment on HackerNews, or tells me that I can't (well, I hope not). So until I get a call from Google HR telling me I did something bad on HN, I do it. I don't think this is Google specific, I don't think the vast majority of employees in the tech sector obtain permission for both after hours contributions they make on the internet, or even stuff they do while at work, even though most companies have a policy not to use work computers for personal things. People just don't compartmentalize their lives like that. Like say you're at the office, you're browsing some GitHub repo on a project completely unrelated to your company, and you notice an easy to fix bug, and send in a PR on your work desktop while at the office. Is your company allowing you to do this explicitly, or do they just not care, as long as you're being responsible and not spending all day at the office working on non-work stuff and not deliverables. The COVID era brings this even more into focus, with everyone working from home now, really, how many people are doing other work during office hours? You're trying too hard to attribute master planning to management, when the truth is, most of these tech companies are more chaotic and autonomous internally then most people realize.

maffydub 6y ago

I suspect Google felt they got burned with Kubernetes - doing a lot of the initial development, donating it to the CNCF and then not profiting much from it (e.g. still being distant 3rd in cloud).

a012 6y ago
Do they? I see their GKE and then now with Anthos thingy got a lot of attention.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  What matters is sales, not attention.
  - akoncius 6y ago
    without attention there will be no sales
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Well it doesn't seem to be working then.
      - harpratap 6y ago
        How can you be so certain? The project is barely 6 years old and so many APIs are JUST reaching v1. And companies are still using mostly barebones K8s, we are yet to see how RedHat, Azure differentiate on top of it and we get to see all the "distros"
        pjmlp 6y ago
        By the market position of Amazon and Microsoft versus what Google keeps trying to do, and there are enough candidates for that 3rd place.

johannes1234321 6y ago

I don't see altruism, but alignment of different interests. Summer of Code is a huge project they finance, seems altruistic but is a recruiting&marketing tool. Publishing libraries like protobuf and abseil serves to drive standards in directions they like. Chrome/Chromium drives the open web, ensures their say on standards and gives the ability to set them. Android/AOSP brings leadership in mobile devices to them. Again driving standards to their needs and preventing Apple from making the mobile world a google-free walked garden. SDKs for their services - obvious. And to be clear, that is by no means bad. And that potential abuse of their position has to be controlled (i.e. when setting web standards to their likings) is mostly independent from their software being open or not.

polskibus 6y ago
Moats, moats everywhere.
jononor 6y ago
Some open source projects might also be (partially) for employee retention. Letting some high-performing developer(s) open source internally developed projects because it is what they want to do. Might be particularly relevant for developer tooling where commercial potential is generally quite low.
solarkraft 6y ago
> Publishing libraries like protobuf and abseil serves to drive standards in directions they like. Could you elaborate on why they care? Do they have some kind of competitive advantage when it comes to Protobuf?
- johannes1234321 6y ago
  For abseil this is a bit simpler, so I start there: On the one hand it is a library they publish so that other libraries they publish (Googletest, protobuf, ..) can use it on the other hand it drives development of the C++ standard and adoption according to their needs ("see our hashmap is faster and more efficient, make it part of the standard! (Then we don't have to maintain it anymore, but compiler vendors will)") With things like protobuf/grcp it's a bit harder, but if they define the standard for data exchange between machines they can eventually - use it as apart of their search indexer - incorporate external services into their products while keeping their standard architecture - integrate acquired software into their stack (you hope being acquired by google? Prepare ;) ) - it reduces risk of alternative approaches from becoming defaults, which could harm Google's integration wishes - if job candidates are used to protobuf there is one thing less to reach a new hire This certainly isn't a conclusive list, and I can't judge relevance of each for their decision, but those things certainly impact the decision aside from "we think it's cool"

dmantis 6y ago

Altruism or not - it's a very bad idea to handle rights over open-source trademarks by one US-based organization due to aggressive political interventions from the gov: e.g. gitlab case with discrimination over russian/chinese hires, case with github removing Iran accounts, etc. Open-source should be extensively distributed over many actors to prevent any government censorship and attacks by political reasons.

lmz 6y ago
None of those cases have anything to do with trademarks. Infrastructure/economic control maybe, but not trademarks.

tw04 6y ago

Given it's run by someone from Oracle, skepticism/cynicism is warranted.

naringas 6y ago

There's something of the older BSD/Unix engeineering culture all through google's technical sutff. It's noticable through their documentaion and in some of their architectural decisions and general approach/attitude towards software engineering. I've have noticed that it's faded somewhat but it's still there, it's noticable specially when contrasting it with Amazon's approach which has a different approach or style to it. I think it has to do with the origins of older google engineers (this also would explain why/how it's diluted but still there) Also it seems that in some parts of google are trying to move away from these in order to be seem more enterprise friendly? But personally, I really like google's more engineer-oriented attitude (here are they pieces and how they are made, you can figure it out) versus a more hand-holding style which later makes it difficult to move beyond the happy path. it's not very easy to explain what I mean exactly as it all comes from a rather vague sensation about engineering style.

pjmlp 6y ago
I guess you don't have much experience with Android development.