> 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 distincti

> 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).