Comment by titzer

As if Google didn't take anything from us. Google makes money selling your attention and brainpower to the highest bidder. Hands down. They are the biggest entity in the attention economy and their real customers are advertisers.

Google has two billion lines of code that determine the course of your daily life. It processes incredibly sensitive information, like every interaction you have with another person in a digital medium, and has a rootkit on basically every phone that collects "anonymous usage data" that is processed in a completely opaque manner and is subject to information "requests" from illiberal and sometimes even totalitarian governments, and a few open source contributions aren't going to change that.

Open source at Google is driven by engineers and contributors, not by executives or strategy. It's a fig leaf over one of the world's largest, most valuable, and well-guarded code bases that absolutely will not be made open.