Comment by Eridrus
2 days ago
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)
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.
A lot of it also comes from acquired projects/companies, that are brought to google3, with plans to deprecate and get rid of eventually
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.
Oh yeah, manipulating users and monetary siphoning data with their advertising schemes.
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