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It's disappointing to see the historical revisionism in these threads. Say what you will about google now, but the idea that they just bought their way into X i
by creato 1y ago
It's disappointing to see the historical revisionism in these threads. Say what you will about google now, but the idea that they just bought their way into X industry doesn't seem right. Until maybe 10 years ago, tech people almost universally loved Google's offerings and adopted them eagerly because they were good. I remember the mad scramble on various forums for a gmail invite. I remember when google maps came about, it was a revelation compared to mapquest and so on. You could scroll the map instead of clicking buttons to jump half a screen at a time! For years 0-5 at least, chrome was almost universally loved by tech people. Process isolation, speed, lack of toolbar shitware, etc.
At every company I've been at, half the dependencies came from big tech, and more than half of those were built and maintained by google. bazel, kubernetes, test frameworks, tensorflow, etc. these are just the big ones. There are a lot of smaller libraries from google that we've used too, and more still that aren't owned by google but they invest a lot of engineering time into.
I don't know what the right answer is to the google of today, but the cavalier assumption that google has simply leveraged a monopoly in search to build everything else it has doesn't add up to me.
- hu3 1y agoMeanwhile Apple, also sitting on infinite cash, is easily entertained by toying with regulators around the world and contributes back almost nothing in comparison to Google. Heck, they can't even be bothered to fund a single developer to help their hardware run Linux.
- prepend 1y agoWhy would Apple have developers working on their hardware running Linux? Apple doesn’t use Linux. They aren’t the biggest oss dev, but they have a decent amount of contributions. [0][1] It’s hard to compare how much Google vs Apple contributes to open source, but not sure why anyone would think Apple “contributes back almost nothing.” [0] https://github.com/appleopen https://github.com/appleopen [1] https://opensource.apple.com/projects/ https://opensource.apple.com/projects/
- hu3 1y agoPlease stare at your own links for a second. Let me help you: https://github.com/orgs/appleopen/repositories?q=sort%3Astars https://github.com/orgs/appleopen/repositories?q=sort%3Astar... Their most popular repo in that entire account has 8 stars. I have multiple personal repos with more usage than that. As for the other link. More than half of those projects are Apple specific.
- fnfjfk 1y agohttps://github.com/swiftlang/swift https://github.com/swiftlang/swift
- prepend 1y agoLook at the second link. Many of their projects aren’t in appleopen. That’s great you have personal repos with more than 8 stars!
- saagarjha 1y agoThose aren't official repositories; they're just someone's mirror.
- selfhoster 1y agoAgreed, between Google, Microsoft and Apple, Apple is the worst in not contributing jack back to the world. I can't stand how Microsoft was able to get to their status using evil means but at least the Microsoft of today does give back open and free (at least in beer) products. Google is the best of the three in this regard. Come to think of it, not sure where I'd place Amazon on that scale.
- stonogo 1y agoYou keep qualifying your comments with "by tech people" but the problem is that Google bought their way into non-tech people's computers. Every single Google product on every single pageload had an "install Chrome" link at the top. Every Chrome release blurred the line between 'signing into chrome' and 'signing into google' and, later, 'signing into your phone'. Most Google products broke on non-Chrome browsers on such a regular cadence that deliberate sabotage was a common assumption. So yes, Google has always been a darling to the "tech people", but the aggressive ways they worked to ensure that people adopted Chrome were very real.
- light_hue_1 1y agoYou're right. And that really shows you how destructive Google has been. 10-20 years ago Google was amazing. Their products were great. We all wanted them. And now, we have pretty much exactly those products. Almost nothing has improved in 10+ years. That's exactly the behavior of a monopoly. Their products are now aggressively hostile to users and their interests. Like Chrome trying to kill of ad blockers. Google now sits on what is now a low quality outdated product forever using their market power to keep everyone else out. That's why we have antitrust laws. To kill Googles.
- int_19h 1y agoGmail and GMaps were 20 years ago. Chrome, almost 15 years ago.