All good questions, but I think the idea of open source or open spec is not an "either your 100% or your not". For me, it's more about attitude and orientation,

All good questions, but I think the idea of open source or open spec is not an "either your 100% or your not". For me, it's more about attitude and orientation, not achieving perfection. Even companies which are primarily open source non-profits keep secrets. I look at Search and Ads and Datacenter secrecy being closed as necessary evils to fund everything else, you've got to have a rich uncle who will let you work in his basement if you want to work on open software. Search in particular, represents a challenge, since even if Google were to just ship the source to it's search engine, it would likely devalue the search engine by showing blackhat SEOs exactly how to spam. Like I said, the natural proclivity of many Googlers is to lobby for open specs and source, to bitch and moan about it internally. Sometimes they win, sometimes they don't. Many googlers don't like secrecy. Google will still have a competitive advantage over most other companies because of the datacenters, so the source availability is often not a threat IMHO. I could give you the source to Gmail, chances are, you won't be able to run it competitively without investing a billion dollars in infrastructure. That said, Google has published papers on it's crown jewels, like Spanner, Borg, GFS, Map/Reduce/ et al, stuff which makes its services scale very well.