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> 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
by 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 agoThere 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 agoThe 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.