4 ms·

Their commitment to open source, however, might go. Quite recently Google quietly unshipped an effort to make their protobuf build rules more useful to OSS use

Their commitment to open source, however, might go. Quite recently Google quietly unshipped an effort to make their protobuf build rules more useful to OSS users of Bazel (see the rules_proto repository). This wasted a huge amount of planning and work that'd gone into the migration. And the fact that these tools are designed first and foremost for Google use shows up everywhere. Stuff that Google fundamentally doesn't care about but is widely used (eg Ruby) is stagnant. In this state, it's totally reasonable to reconsider whether these tools are worth building on top of. I personally still believe! But I don't blame people who are skeptical.

jatins 2y ago
> Their commitment to open source, however, might go Google's OSS contributions are largely correlated to the fact that they could _afford_ to do OSS. When you have the best business model in the world, you can afford X% of your engineering hours focused on OSS. Of course, it's purely not altruistic they also get back a lot in return However, if due to AI or other advancements, Google's business model takes a hit I wouldn't be surprised that their OSS contributions are the first to go off. Like we saw Google codejam being discontinued in 2022 layoffs Though if your business outlives Google, gRPC going away might be least of your problems
- mikaraento 2y ago
  There was a influential internal white paper about not being a "tech island" that drove open-sourcing. The point was that by having its own tech stack Google would eventually be left behind and have a harder time recruiting. Not sure if the message is still believed as strongly.
  - SR2Z 2y ago
    The message is pretty well understood - the only difference is that the monorepo (think of it as a service in and of itself) and its associated tooling do get seen as "Google-specific." Bazel in general has really awful support.

jatins 2y ago

> Their commitment to open source, however, might go Google's OSS contributions are largely correlated to the fact that they could _afford_ to do OSS. When you have the best business model in the world, you can afford X% of your engineering hours focused on OSS. Of course, it's purely not altruistic they also get back a lot in return However, if due to AI or other advancements, Google's business model takes a hit I wouldn't be surprised that their OSS contributions are the first to go off. Like we saw Google codejam being discontinued in 2022 layoffs Though if your business outlives Google, gRPC going away might be least of your problems

mikaraento 2y ago
There was a influential internal white paper about not being a "tech island" that drove open-sourcing. The point was that by having its own tech stack Google would eventually be left behind and have a harder time recruiting. Not sure if the message is still believed as strongly.
- SR2Z 2y ago
  The message is pretty well understood - the only difference is that the monorepo (think of it as a service in and of itself) and its associated tooling do get seen as "Google-specific." Bazel in general has really awful support.