3 ms·

This is a big deal, I think. I'm guessing it's not widely used internally anymore if they are open sourcing it. What is used instead?

• simonw 3y ago
  I don't think "not widely used internally anymore" is a common rationale for open sourcing something. Generally I'd expect companies to open source things when it's proven itself internally and they want to reap the benefits of open source: - Make internal engineers happy - engineers like having their code released outside the bounds of their company - Prestige, which can help with hiring - External contributions (not even code necessarily, just feedback from people who are using it can be amazingly useful for improving the software) - Ability to hire people in the future who already know important parts of your technical stack, and don't need internal training on it - Externally produced resources that help people learn how to use the software (tutorials, community discussion forums etc) If the software is no longer used internally, open sourcing it is MORE expensive - first you have to get through the whole process of ensuring the code you are releasing can be released (lots of auditing, legal reviews etc), and then you'll have to deal with a flow of support requests which you can either deal with (expensive, especially if your internal knowledge of the tool is atrophying) or ignore (expensive to your reputation).
  • mlinhares 3y ago
    Google has done this before so it's not surprising people would think that.
    • tomrod 3y ago
      To be fair, I can often be uninformed with regards to some of the smaller movements of techcos.
  • palata 3y ago
    IMO, you forget one important point: control. If your open source project/protocol is the most popular, and you have the governance over it, then you decide where it goes. Chromium is open source, but Google controls it, and everyone who depends on it has to follow. If Chromium was not open source, maybe Firefox would be more popular, and Google would not have control over that. > or ignore (expensive to your reputation). I don't think that anything is expensive for Google. They can do whatever they want.
• nivekney 3y ago
  It's based on ParlayLib, which is for shared-memory multicore machines. Highly suspect that they moved the algorithms on to distributed systems.
• wilsynet 3y ago
  As merely two examples, both gRPC and Kubernetes are important to Google, and yet Google opened sourced them. "No longer used" is not the criteria Google uses to make their software OSS. FYI, I work at Google.
  • jefftk 3y ago
    Google Wave is the only counterexample I can think of, where it was "we're deprecating this project, but releasing it as open source".
    • bsimpson 3y ago
      I don't think Google generally opensources _products_ - either it always is open source (Android) or never is (web apps). I can't think of an example where a product was closed source, released as open source, and continually maintained. Open source at Google generally takes the form of libraries rather than products. Often, that's something that an individual engineer is working on, and it's easier to open source than get the copyright reassigned (since Google by default owns any code you write). There are also libraries that are open sourced for business reasons - e.g. SDKs. You can tell the difference, because most individually-driven libraries contain the copy "Not an official Google product" in the README.
      • progval 3y ago
        > I can't think of an example where a product was closed source, released as open source, and continually maintained. I found one after some searching: Nomulus. https://opensource.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-nomulus-open-source.html https://opensource.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-nomulu...
  • tomrod 3y ago
    Thanks for clarifying
  • PaulHoule 3y ago
    I'd say both of those are actively harmful products (like PFOS or cigarettes) that hurt Google's competition by being open sourced. Google wrecked their own productivity, the least they could do was wreck everybody else's.
• spankalee 3y ago
  Most projects try not to open something that's not going to be maintained. If they do it's usually rather loudly called out in the readme.
• meneer_oke 3y ago
  Would it be possible to explain why it's big deal.