April 11th, 2007
Google's role in an open source world
This would not be the open source decade without Google.
Everyone who cares knows that Google's giant server farms run Linux. The company freely offers APIs for its most interesting features, it contributes to a wide variety of open source projects, and it will host a Developer Day on May 31 at 10 company offices around the world.
As a result Google probably has more free development work going on outside its offices than any other company in the world
It's also important to note there are limits to this generosity. Google's search algorithms are held as strictly proprietary, they are not shared, and they are subject to change without notice.
This is an important point, because the remaining open source skeptics do like worrying about the loss of trade secrets to open source, and the loss of corporate control with open source.
That tain't necessarily so. Google proves you can scale an enormous company in a short time, share code extensively (under a variety of licenses), yet still keep what you need to have private, private. They are Exhibit A for the Fortune 500 about the wisdom of an open source strategy.
That may be their most important contribution of all.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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