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This is entirely correct. Open sourcing tensorflow was about getting the world to use Google's stuff so that that stuff became more valuable / remained valuable
by dgacmu 4y ago
This is entirely correct. Open sourcing tensorflow was about getting the world to use Google's stuff so that that stuff became more valuable / remained valuable / was possible to hire people with experience in it, not about getting people to work on it for free. The ratio of external to internal contributions is extremely small.
Google saw what happened with other of their technologies like map reduce (not open sourced, the world reinvented in Hadoop and the progress started happening there instead of in MR) and wanted to avoid becoming the bit player in a space they pioneered in. It's a reasonable strategy. (The risk is that you're giving away something that could be a competitive advantage.)
(worked on tensorflow at Google for four years.)
- CHY872 4y agoK8s another example. Kind of amazing that Google effectively owns the now-standard deployment solution off of 'we don't really use K8s but want you to build your applications like us and K8s is a bit like something we do use'. At least Tensorflow's actually what Google runs internally (to best of my knowledge)!
- sombragris 4y agoAnd what about Fuchsia? The primary value I see for it is that it looks like the un-Linux, especially in the license space. Google really hates copyleft and the GPL.
- HideousKojima 4y agoI mean if Fuchsia ever starts getting used for production at some point by anyone, anywhere. Seems like more of a way to do systems research by Google than something designed for real world use.
- sombragris 4y agoIf that was the case (an academic exercise in systems research, nothing for the real world), then arguably a strong copyleft license such as GPL would have been even better.