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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 pe

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.

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.