Comment by adsharma

I didn't mean anything nefarious here :)

Since Google would rather have the best brains in the industry build the next search indexing algorithm or the browser, they didn't have the time to invest human capital into building a better open source friendly dev environment.

A natural alternative is to contract out the work. Linux distributors were good candidates for such contract work.

But the vibe back then was Google could build better alternatives to some of these libraries and therefore bridging the gap between dev experience as an open source dev vs in house software engineer wasn't important.

You could see the same argument play out in git vs monorepo etc, where people take up strong positions on a particular narrow tech topic, whereas the larger issue gets ignored as a result of these belief systems.