November 13th, 2008
Google fatal flaw revealed
Re-reading some notes from yesterday’s work, and recalling several other stories from the past year, I may have come upon Google’s fatal flaw.
Not invented here syndrome.
A clue was found in the words of Black Duck’s Peter Vescuso, noting how Google released versions of Chrome and Android with well-known flaws in them. The flaws were patched in underlying technology but Google went with old versions.
”Google feels they’re a very sophisticated organization, they know open source,” Vescuso said.
Do they?
I can understand Google being the 800-pound gorilla in the open source room, and avoiding licenses that might expose its own code to the release requirements of the AGPL.
Google is a highly-scaled operation, a Gulliver among open source Lilliputians. When it decides to move on an open source project, the project is done quickly, and most of the final work carries the stamp of a Google employee.
But in open source no man, and no company, is an island. You can’t, you shouldn’t, and you don’t need to do everything yourself.
Yet whether I’m covering the efforts at Chrome, at Android, or at Google Health, what I see are Google employees working on a Google Island, depending only on fellow Googlers and Google-made code in their efforts.
You can already see this attitude hurting the company in the slow progress of things like Google Sites, Google’s Blogger, and Google News. Not invented here syndrome can cause real problems.
By operating in this way Google may be missing many of the advantages in the open source ethos it claims to expound. You want to verify code from outside before trusting it, but dismissing it out of hand is a mistake.
It makes you no different than Microsoft. Maybe better, but no different. Google needs to embrace other open source vendors, their products and code. It needs to share the load, and some of the credit, to get where it wants to go.
Please write me if you see this changing.
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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| 11/13/08
