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>At Google we believe that open systems win. Open-source software has been at the root of many innovations in cloud computing, the mobile web, and the Internet

>At Google we believe that open systems win. Open-source software has been at the root of many innovations in cloud computing, the mobile web, and the Internet generally Except for Google Maps, GMail, Google Search, Google Apps, AdSense, AdWords, Reader, Code Search, News, or pretty much any of their web apps or which make them money. In those cases, proprietary closed source wins.

cromwellian 14y ago
Many of those are so closely tied to the specifics of Google's data centers or the masses of data collected, that the source would be mostly useless anyway. What differentiates many of these services is not the front-end (it's not like OpenMaps can't do a decent frontend), but the scale. Anyone can write and run a gmail-like service, just look at MailBox.app or Sparrow and the hundreds of webmails that used to exist. Not everyone can do it and serve 500 million users with low latency and high uptime.
magicalist 14y ago
There's a link in the very line that you're quoting that goes to an article that discusses "open systems" and "open-source software" as distinct things, and addresses the benefits of open systems and an open-source stack, even when building closed-sourced software. You may disagree completely with the arguments in the article, but at least it's trying to engage in the subject, which is more than can be said for your sound-bite answer to the first two sentences of the linked blog post. At no point does your quote say that open-source always wins, or that all things should be open-source, so it's like you didn't read even those two sentences. It always seems a bit artificial when people trot out "middlebrow dismissal", but geez...
- cooldeal 14y ago
  >There's a link in the very line that you're quoting that goes to an article that discusses "open systems" and "open-source software" as distinct things This is what it says about open systems. >Another way to look at the difference between open and closed systems is that open systems allow innovation at all levels — from the operating system to the application layer — not just at the top. This means that one company doesn't have to depend on another's benevolence to ship a product. If the GNU C compiler that I'm using has a bug, I can fix it since the compiler is open source. I don't have to file a bug report and hope for a timely response. From that it appears that they're conflating "open systems" and "open source software", not drawing a distinction like you're claiming. >At no point does your quote say that open-source always wins, or that all things should be open-source, so it's like you didn't read even those two sentences. From the same link that you site, Google says this: >We believe that open is the only way for this to have the broadest impact for the most people. We are technology optimists who trust that the chaos of open benefits everyone. We will fight to promote it every chance we get. >Open will win. It will win on the Internet and will then cascade across many walks of life: The future of government is transparency. The future of commerce is information symmetry. The future of culture is freedom. The future of science and medicine is collaboration.
  - aspensmonster 14y ago
    >If the GNU C compiler that I'm using has a bug, I can fix it since the compiler is open source. >since the compiler is open source. But it's not open source. It's free software.
  - magicalist 14y ago
    > This is what it says about open systems. ... > From that it appears that they're conflating "open systems" and "open source software", not drawing a distinction like you're claiming. Well it says a good bit more than that. It's certainly not conflating; his argument appears to be that open source is a component of "open systems" (he also calls out "open standards" and "open information" as other components, and explicitly doesn't require all three). >> At no point does your quote say that open-source always wins, or that all things should be open-source, so it's like you didn't read even those two sentences. > From the same link that you site, Google says this: >> We believe that open is the only way for this to have the broadest impact for the most people. We are technology optimists who trust that the chaos of open benefits everyone. We will fight to promote it every chance we get. >> Open will win. It will win on the Internet and will then cascade across many walks of life: The future of government is transparency. The future of commerce is information symmetry. The future of culture is freedom. The future of science and medicine is collaboration. Those aren't contradictory statements. Just to be clear, I'm certainly not saying that the "open" article is a perfect crystallization of open-source/open-web/open-whatever philosophy, nor would I say that Google has lived up to all the ideals in that article. "Open systems" remains a poorly defined term at the end of that article (though the individual concepts fare better), the paragraphs on why google has closed-source software is awfully tilted to the "people will game these systems if they are open source" without mentioning the myriad other reason you might (and they do) keep source closed, and the open standards section is a bit prickly these days (I personally don't think not maintaining an RSS feed reader is a blow to standards, as others do, but I remain disappointed that G+ is not a federated system (or moving to one), for instance). All that said, the original comment remains facile (and not even that, as the statement "Open-source software has been at the root of many innovations in cloud computing, the mobile web, and the Internet generally" is trivially true, even (or especially) for the products mentioned).
onemorepassword 14y ago
Never mind any of those products. Google's core business is advertising. Open systems allow you to filter out advertising and avoid being tracked and exploited. Google's raison d'etre is diametrically opposed to open systems. Everything else is PR bullshit. Google believes in whatever makes them the most money, just like any other corporation. They're just more dishonest about it than most.
- unavoidable 14y ago
  It's very interesting to see the hacker community turn on Google so abruptly over the last year or so. Not sure why, but it seems to me that Google itself has not actually changed its business model much, though its perception has turned radically downward.
  - onemorepassword 14y ago
    I can only speak for myself, but I was done with Google a long time ago. The 180 on net neutrality, the anti-privacy stance combined with downright illegal (at least in the EU) activities, the pro-active pandering to the copyright mafia, the anti-anonymity policy, the increased geo-tarding or services etcetera. All of these are not just "things I don't like", they are things that go against the values Google suggested, if not outright proclaimed, they stood for. Google has turned on the hacker community quite a while ago. What I find particularly galling is that Google abuses the notion that they stand for openness and global internet freedom as PR-fodder, whilst being one of the most powerful forces in achieving exactly the opposite. Even Microsoft only went as far as to proclaim their tactics were about "innovation". Google is far more cynical.
  - r00fus 14y ago
    It's because all of those instances of "more wood behind fewer arrows" indicate Google is going on a war-footing. Look at all their more recent activity aside from the not-quite-here-yet Glass and Driverless Car projects: 1) Google+ is an attack against Facebook 2) Shopping Express is attacking Amazon 3) Chromebook and Nexus are attacking Apple and Microsoft directly. 4) Chrome is about to metastasize into a full-on OS, and this can be seen in Google's lack of interest in fixing simple "browser" issues as they put more and more kitchen sink into Chrome. All of this is well and good - companies need to press their competitors in order to stay profitable and secure. However, all of this coming at the expense of many their cool projects and widely used services like Reader. What's next, Voice (use G Chat instead)? Blogs (use G+ instead)? It sucks wondering what's next on the chopping block. If Google is going to war, then they're no longer "nice" or "neutral". Google is throwing down the gauntlet and there's a fear that they'll be as closed as Apple or Microsoft, if they feel it's more profitable.

cromwellian 14y ago

Many of those are so closely tied to the specifics of Google's data centers or the masses of data collected, that the source would be mostly useless anyway. What differentiates many of these services is not the front-end (it's not like OpenMaps can't do a decent frontend), but the scale. Anyone can write and run a gmail-like service, just look at MailBox.app or Sparrow and the hundreds of webmails that used to exist. Not everyone can do it and serve 500 million users with low latency and high uptime.

magicalist 14y ago

There's a link in the very line that you're quoting that goes to an article that discusses "open systems" and "open-source software" as distinct things, and addresses the benefits of open systems and an open-source stack, even when building closed-sourced software. You may disagree completely with the arguments in the article, but at least it's trying to engage in the subject, which is more than can be said for your sound-bite answer to the first two sentences of the linked blog post. At no point does your quote say that open-source always wins, or that all things should be open-source, so it's like you didn't read even those two sentences. It always seems a bit artificial when people trot out "middlebrow dismissal", but geez...

cooldeal 14y ago
>There's a link in the very line that you're quoting that goes to an article that discusses "open systems" and "open-source software" as distinct things This is what it says about open systems. >Another way to look at the difference between open and closed systems is that open systems allow innovation at all levels — from the operating system to the application layer — not just at the top. This means that one company doesn't have to depend on another's benevolence to ship a product. If the GNU C compiler that I'm using has a bug, I can fix it since the compiler is open source. I don't have to file a bug report and hope for a timely response. From that it appears that they're conflating "open systems" and "open source software", not drawing a distinction like you're claiming. >At no point does your quote say that open-source always wins, or that all things should be open-source, so it's like you didn't read even those two sentences. From the same link that you site, Google says this: >We believe that open is the only way for this to have the broadest impact for the most people. We are technology optimists who trust that the chaos of open benefits everyone. We will fight to promote it every chance we get. >Open will win. It will win on the Internet and will then cascade across many walks of life: The future of government is transparency. The future of commerce is information symmetry. The future of culture is freedom. The future of science and medicine is collaboration.
- aspensmonster 14y ago
  >If the GNU C compiler that I'm using has a bug, I can fix it since the compiler is open source. >since the compiler is open source. But it's not open source. It's free software.
- magicalist 14y ago
  > This is what it says about open systems. ... > From that it appears that they're conflating "open systems" and "open source software", not drawing a distinction like you're claiming. Well it says a good bit more than that. It's certainly not conflating; his argument appears to be that open source is a component of "open systems" (he also calls out "open standards" and "open information" as other components, and explicitly doesn't require all three). >> At no point does your quote say that open-source always wins, or that all things should be open-source, so it's like you didn't read even those two sentences. > From the same link that you site, Google says this: >> We believe that open is the only way for this to have the broadest impact for the most people. We are technology optimists who trust that the chaos of open benefits everyone. We will fight to promote it every chance we get. >> Open will win. It will win on the Internet and will then cascade across many walks of life: The future of government is transparency. The future of commerce is information symmetry. The future of culture is freedom. The future of science and medicine is collaboration. Those aren't contradictory statements. Just to be clear, I'm certainly not saying that the "open" article is a perfect crystallization of open-source/open-web/open-whatever philosophy, nor would I say that Google has lived up to all the ideals in that article. "Open systems" remains a poorly defined term at the end of that article (though the individual concepts fare better), the paragraphs on why google has closed-source software is awfully tilted to the "people will game these systems if they are open source" without mentioning the myriad other reason you might (and they do) keep source closed, and the open standards section is a bit prickly these days (I personally don't think not maintaining an RSS feed reader is a blow to standards, as others do, but I remain disappointed that G+ is not a federated system (or moving to one), for instance). All that said, the original comment remains facile (and not even that, as the statement "Open-source software has been at the root of many innovations in cloud computing, the mobile web, and the Internet generally" is trivially true, even (or especially) for the products mentioned).

onemorepassword 14y ago

Never mind any of those products. Google's core business is advertising. Open systems allow you to filter out advertising and avoid being tracked and exploited. Google's raison d'etre is diametrically opposed to open systems. Everything else is PR bullshit. Google believes in whatever makes them the most money, just like any other corporation. They're just more dishonest about it than most.

unavoidable 14y ago
It's very interesting to see the hacker community turn on Google so abruptly over the last year or so. Not sure why, but it seems to me that Google itself has not actually changed its business model much, though its perception has turned radically downward.
- onemorepassword 14y ago
  I can only speak for myself, but I was done with Google a long time ago. The 180 on net neutrality, the anti-privacy stance combined with downright illegal (at least in the EU) activities, the pro-active pandering to the copyright mafia, the anti-anonymity policy, the increased geo-tarding or services etcetera. All of these are not just "things I don't like", they are things that go against the values Google suggested, if not outright proclaimed, they stood for. Google has turned on the hacker community quite a while ago. What I find particularly galling is that Google abuses the notion that they stand for openness and global internet freedom as PR-fodder, whilst being one of the most powerful forces in achieving exactly the opposite. Even Microsoft only went as far as to proclaim their tactics were about "innovation". Google is far more cynical.
- r00fus 14y ago
  It's because all of those instances of "more wood behind fewer arrows" indicate Google is going on a war-footing. Look at all their more recent activity aside from the not-quite-here-yet Glass and Driverless Car projects: 1) Google+ is an attack against Facebook 2) Shopping Express is attacking Amazon 3) Chromebook and Nexus are attacking Apple and Microsoft directly. 4) Chrome is about to metastasize into a full-on OS, and this can be seen in Google's lack of interest in fixing simple "browser" issues as they put more and more kitchen sink into Chrome. All of this is well and good - companies need to press their competitors in order to stay profitable and secure. However, all of this coming at the expense of many their cool projects and widely used services like Reader. What's next, Voice (use G Chat instead)? Blogs (use G+ instead)? It sucks wondering what's next on the chopping block. If Google is going to war, then they're no longer "nice" or "neutral". Google is throwing down the gauntlet and there's a fear that they'll be as closed as Apple or Microsoft, if they feel it's more profitable.