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Part of the joke here is that Google is borderline allergic to using open source software that it doesn't maintain.

by mgraczyk 4y ago

CydeWeys 4y ago
Not remotely true in my experience. Have you worked at Google, and seen the sheer size of third_party?
- mgraczyk 4y ago
  Yes I boomeranged for a total of around 4 years, (ldap mgraczyk). I am aware there is a lot of third party code, but compared to the rest of the world, google is very averse to open source that it doesn't control. See for example frontend frameworks (react vs lit), ML frameworks (tensorflow vs pytorch), javascript transpilers (closure vs everything else), C++ logging, C++ unit testing, C++ anything basically. It seems like Google is slightly better about this in the Java world, but for the languages I mostly use Google is more guilty of "Not invented here" than other places I have worked. It's possible most of the code in third_party is written by Google, btw.
  - CydeWeys 4y ago
    I don't know what to say other than that my experience here is precisely the opposite of yours. Different areas of the company? I use a LOT of third party libraries in the course of my employment, and third_party in my experience is full of legitimate third party libraries, not ones that are developed by Google. Anyway, here's the list of dependencies for my project. There's a lot of third-party stuff in it: https://github.com/google/nomulus/blob/master/dependencies.gradle https://github.com/google/nomulus/blob/master/dependencies.g...
    - jrockway 4y ago
      I think they're leaning in the direction of "Google doesn't like open source because they made Bigtable instead of using MySQL", which, at least when I was there, was a debate that spawned many centithreads. Generally, I miss 99% of the internal stuff at Google. Prometheus/Grafana is very disappointing compared to Monarch/Panopticon, for example. I also like Go a lot more than Java. So generally, I had no complaints about NIH when I was at Google. Whether it's the best use of their money is up for debate, but I never found them hostile towards open source. (I was also a third_party reviewer. Lots of people using open-source libraries at Google.)
      - CydeWeys 4y ago
        Yeah, that could be it. But in a lot of cases Google is writing its own stuff for real reasons. Maybe I'm just older / have been in more diverse parts of industry, but I've literally worked at employers where open source software was verboten (this used to be quite common even). Compared to that, my use of dozens of open source libraries on my current project at Google is open source heaven. Sure, a smaller startup might be using even more open source libraries because they don't have the resources of Google to write stuff like Monarch/Panopticon for internal use, but to my eye that's orthogonal on the issue of open source friendliness.

Part of the joke here is that Google is borderline allergic to using open source software that it doesn't maintain.

CydeWeys 4y ago

Not remotely true in my experience. Have you worked at Google, and seen the sheer size of third_party?

mgraczyk 4y ago
Yes I boomeranged for a total of around 4 years, (ldap mgraczyk). I am aware there is a lot of third party code, but compared to the rest of the world, google is very averse to open source that it doesn't control. See for example frontend frameworks (react vs lit), ML frameworks (tensorflow vs pytorch), javascript transpilers (closure vs everything else), C++ logging, C++ unit testing, C++ anything basically. It seems like Google is slightly better about this in the Java world, but for the languages I mostly use Google is more guilty of "Not invented here" than other places I have worked. It's possible most of the code in third_party is written by Google, btw.
- CydeWeys 4y ago
  I don't know what to say other than that my experience here is precisely the opposite of yours. Different areas of the company? I use a LOT of third party libraries in the course of my employment, and third_party in my experience is full of legitimate third party libraries, not ones that are developed by Google. Anyway, here's the list of dependencies for my project. There's a lot of third-party stuff in it: https://github.com/google/nomulus/blob/master/dependencies.gradle https://github.com/google/nomulus/blob/master/dependencies.g...
  - jrockway 4y ago
    I think they're leaning in the direction of "Google doesn't like open source because they made Bigtable instead of using MySQL", which, at least when I was there, was a debate that spawned many centithreads. Generally, I miss 99% of the internal stuff at Google. Prometheus/Grafana is very disappointing compared to Monarch/Panopticon, for example. I also like Go a lot more than Java. So generally, I had no complaints about NIH when I was at Google. Whether it's the best use of their money is up for debate, but I never found them hostile towards open source. (I was also a third_party reviewer. Lots of people using open-source libraries at Google.)
    - CydeWeys 4y ago
      Yeah, that could be it. But in a lot of cases Google is writing its own stuff for real reasons. Maybe I'm just older / have been in more diverse parts of industry, but I've literally worked at employers where open source software was verboten (this used to be quite common even). Compared to that, my use of dozens of open source libraries on my current project at Google is open source heaven. Sure, a smaller startup might be using even more open source libraries because they don't have the resources of Google to write stuff like Monarch/Panopticon for internal use, but to my eye that's orthogonal on the issue of open source friendliness.