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People passing cynical comments at Google need to understand that at a big co like Google, something like this doesn't 'just happen'. It probably happened becau
by elevatedastalt 2y ago
People passing cynical comments at Google need to understand that at a big co like Google, something like this doesn't 'just happen'. It probably happened because some passionate L6/L7 engineer wanted to do it and pushed through the bureaucracy to get approvals for it, probably largely on their own time (by which I mean that this was at best a side-project for them and at worst a distraction that was losing them favor with their bosses). At every point in the process, they probably had to justify what they were doing to their leads, to lawyers, to privacy reviewers, who had no real stake in it and so had nothing to lose by saying No. They almost certainly won't receive any career progress out of this and would risk a setback if something slips through the cracks (such as some unredacted proprietary information).
They did it because they felt it was the right thing to do. Good things happen through the actions of individuals like this. We should acknowledge and celebrate it when they do, anti-big-tech cynicism can wait.
- jayde2767 2y agoMaybe...the cynic in me says that someone feels this needs to be preserved because it will become another Google relic in favor of something newer, or more shiny. Or likely something written in Go...just a guess on my part...
- frosting1337 2y agoWhat do you mean? Pebble was dead before Google ever bought Fitbit.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nialv7 2y agoI do wonder how they successfully justified this to the higher ups. If anything, I would like to learn from them so I can better justify the things I want to do..
- refulgentis 2y agoGoogle's a strange place currently. Something like this would be bizarrely easy if you had the ear of the right person. (i.e. someone who would tell legal etc. "you gotta do it" when asked) Reason why is, it's a feel-good thing that aligns well with Old Google values, and Google's not yet old enough for "Why bother doing anything at all?" to be an acceptable vocalized response. It has standard, if not worse, dysfunction with internal conflict at this point. But there just isn't room to come up with a good reason to not open-source the decade-old OS.
- adastra22 2y agoThat seems like big standard organizational dysfunction.
- hayleox 2y agoThe source code has zero business value to Google at this point – they have another smartwatch OS and there's never gonna be a business case for a company of Google's scale to revive a niche product like this. Releasing means getting free PR on Hacker News and a free morale boost for employees who care about this kind of thing.
- Zamiel_Snawley 2y agoIsn’t it valuable to Google to keep potential competitors from getting expensive IP for free? “PebbleOS took dozens of engineers working over 4 years to build, alongside our fantastic product and QA teams. Reproducing that for new hardware would take a long time.” [0] [0] https://ericmigi.com/blog/why-were-bringing-pebble-back https://ericmigi.com/blog/why-were-bringing-pebble-back
- refulgentis 2y agoIt's 12 years old. They put good work in. But it's missing an absurd amount of stuff the mass market considered mandatory a decade ago. Consumer electronics, for better or worse, is mostly about spending enough money to get your product name in front of hundreds of millions, and Google knows that well.
- itishappy 2y agoI think it's perfectly reasonable to celebrate this action and the individuals who championed it while also being cynical of the big tech orgs that resist changes like this for the reasons described.
- xeromal 2y agoBeing cynical is almost a default of the internet and I think it squanders a lot of hope. It's better not to be cynical
- adastra22 2y agoIt is better to be less cynical than your average redditor or HN denizen, but not entirely uncynical.
- drzaiusx11 2y agoI'm going to call the above rule, "Goldilocks Cynicism." Words to live by.
- robocat 2y agoThe only financial benefit for Google that I could guess would be to drive complement prices to zero (assuming some Pebble refresh is successful), as part of competition against Apple watch.
- cmrdporcupine 2y agoFrom my experience with working there, it wasn't actually that hard to advocate and get things open sourced that my team worked on after Google made the decision to kill it. (ndash video player stuff that was being done by the team I was on in Fiber @ Google Waterloo). Management is on the whole open to these things, and Google -- unlike other companies I've been at -- has an official process for this, and it feels on the whole fair. For all the sins that Google commits, they're generally decent about the whole open source community. There's things they rely on they should be providing funding for, certainly. But they're good about letting their people contribute, and often good about opening things up to the outside world. Of course this project is bigger and more complicated, and clearly had tendrils into a lot of other things, so...
- jeffbee 2y agoI mean, Google develops three other open source operating systems and is a major contributor to other operating systems, as well from other vast open projects like Chromium. It's not as if open-sourcing an operating system is even slightly out of character for Google.
- Eridrus 2y agoIIRC based on my experience open sourcing some code for a paper, I think you just need to get VP approval, which is probably not that hard if you are a well respected L6/7 in your org.
- khana 2y ago[dead]
- ksec 2y agoThey could consider open source everything you have killed ( https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com ) over the years. May be the whole design and development process from the start should be everything they do could one day be open sourced. So be aware what you do and what you comment.
- teractiveodular 2y agoIt's basically impossible for Google to open-source anything built in house, because it all relies heavily on Borg and various other proprietary tools and libraries that don't exist outside the Googleplex. Pebble, on the other hand, was built fully outside Google and only ended up there via a circuitous route (the Fitbit acquisition), so this is not a concern.
- rkagerer 2y agoSounds like a horrible place to work. (That said, I offer my gratitude for the perseverance it took to get this done)
- 0xedd 2y ago[dead]
- raxxor 2y agoWhich is ironic because Google needs to improve their reputation about sunsetting early. This is one of the main arguments for why many businesses for why they do not employ their alternatives
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- follower 2y agoFor visibility (via comment by 1337shadow @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42848245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42848245): ---- > Instead, we took a more direct route - I asked friends at Google (which bought Fitbit, which had bought Pebble’s IP) if they could open source PebbleOS. They said yes! Over the last year, a team inside Google (including some amazing ex-Pebblers turned Googlers) has been working on this. And today is the day - the source code for PebbleOS is now available at github.com/google/pebble (see their blog post). https://ericmigi.com/blog/why-were-bringing-pebble-back https://ericmigi.com/blog/why-were-bringing-pebble-back ----