Comment by dust42
2 days ago
> Google has poured untold millions into open source over the last couple of decades, not just by sponsorships, but also by employing contributors, etc.
And Google has profited untold hundreds of billions of open source over the last couple of decades. They just need to be reminded of it.
Edit: Haha, getting downvoted! Never underestimate the power of tens of thousands of Googlers on HN... Look, I use Gmail, Google maps, Chrome and Android and occasionally Google search but without Linux, Java and webkit it wouldn't exist.
Google is actually kind of infamous for not using much in the way of OSS software.
The list of things I can think of is:
* Linux
* LLVM
* Webkit/Chrome (which they have done the majority of contributions to for a long time)
* Java & a little bit of Python
There's a whole lot more, check `third_party/` if you work at Google.
(disclaimer, used to work at google a long time ago)
A lot of it also comes from acquired projects/companies, that are brought to google3, with plans to deprecate and get rid of eventually
There were directories there for sure, but I honestly never saw anything get used from there (except I think TensorFlow was in there?).
My personal experience was I never used any OSS code (that wasn't Google Open Sourcing its own code) except Linux & LLVM.
It definitely didn't feel meaningful to the company besides the ones I called out.
So if you subtract linux and LLVM and Webkit and Java, what is left of Google? Absolutely nothing. Well, a mostly empty, dysfunctional mono repo lacking the main dependencies.
I don't think the company would be very different if these projects had never existed and everyone had to pay for proprietary tools.
The people meaningfully benefiting from open source are the people and companies on the margin, not the biggest tech companies in the world.
Come on.
1 reply →
For Linux / ChromeOS: GPU drivers benefit heavily: - Freedreno for Qualcomm - Panthor for Arm Mali
Lots of Linux contributions for Rust drivers
V8 (covered in Chrome), Angular, Dart, Golang, Kubernetes, Android (remember Android???)
Didn’t they open source Kubernetes (aka probably the biggest OSS project since Linux itself)
Biggest in what sense? Certainly not in terms of the size of the code base. It is an order of magnitude smaller than Chromium.
Oh, only Linux? /s
Not surprising these days. HN community wants in on the riches too before the industry crashes.
I think you are getting downvoted because your claim that “without Linux, Java and webkit it wouldn't exist” doesn’t pass the smell test. If Linux didn’t exist, maybe Google will just use one of the BSDs. If Java didn’t exist perhaps Google would just write more code in C++ instead; I’m pretty sure it still has more lines of C++ than Java. Or maybe Go would get invented a few years earlier. And if WebKit didn’t exist maybe Google would just fork KHTML themselves rather than forking a fork of KHTML. A lot of open source software appeared at the right time to be dominant, but without them other different open source software might dominate. But your argument isn’t about what if the entire OSS movement didn’t exist. It’s about what if specific OSS didn’t exist.
And what's your point? When interests align, what's there to complain about?
I'm not, nor have I ever been, a googler, btw. I did apply for a job there in 2006 but didn't make it past the first round (they were asking me obscure TCP/IP questions for a Java developer).
They created V8, kickstarted the modern browser wars with Chrome. They've sponsored tons of Open Source projects via Google Summer of Code. They've done more than their fair share. Half the devops stuff like Kubernetes, probably a lot of the early work related to linux containers, who knows what else.
There is always going to be someone who thinks they can do more. But they didn't have to do _any_ of it. Yet they did a ton.
People probably downvoted your comment because you sound angry and bitter. Get over yourself.