Google and Open Source

» Whoa! It’s On! InsideGoogle - part of the Blog News Channel

TrackBack — Fri, 31 Dec 2004 03:12:00 GMT

» Whoa! It’s On!  InsideGoogle - part of the Blog News Channel

re: Google and Open Source

Adam Bosworth — Fri, 31 Dec 2004 07:26:00 GMT

Well, it is an interesting post from someone who works in a team I started and ran for a while although we never overlapped. Am I supposed to be worried by disagreement. Surely even someone from Microsoft understands that those of us who blog do it as much because we welcome the disagreements from Jean-Jeaque Dubray or Danny Ayers as for any other reason. And for Microsoft to condemm those of us who benefit from Open Source is rich. Honestly, it is like the Nazi's condeming the Swiss from benefiting from the refugees. Krystof's post is interesting. This, unusually for this Blog, is what I'd expect of the company that wantonly destroyed my last one for no good reason save picque.

re: Google and Open Source

Matt Selnekovic — Fri, 31 Dec 2004 09:33:00 GMT

I like this entry. Frankly, Google is just as corporate as Microsoft is. No sense denying it, they are out to make a buck too!
Adam, Microsoft is not condemning anyone, this employee of Microsoft (Dare) is agreeing with Krzysztof. I know its a semantics issue, but not everyone at Microsoft will agree, and Microsoft will probably never officially say any of this.

re: Google and Open Source

Stu — Sat, 01 Jan 2005 02:51:00 GMT

Comparing Microsoft to Nazis, never seen that one before! rofl.

re: Google and Open Source

Michael Teper — Sat, 01 Jan 2005 10:10:00 GMT

Not to mention that the point raised by Krzysztof is perfectly valid.

re: Google and Open Source

Adam Bosworth — Sat, 01 Jan 2005 20:41:00 GMT

Kryzsztof's point may or may not be valid. I welcome debate. As I said, Google does support Open Source. Heck, we have people whose's fulltime job is supporting and working with the Open Source community. And, as an exercise, try Googling "Ballmer open Source" and then my boss "Wayne Rosen open source". It might enlighten you. Consider that while I was running the Web Data team, we did ship an unlimited rights open source Java parser for XML. Ask Dare if they do that now. Sure, both companies want to make money. But believe me, having been at both, tha in no way makes them equivalent.

re: Google and Open Source

Brian Turner — Sat, 01 Jan 2005 21:57:00 GMT

It would be interesting to see if Google are going to back Adam's objections of due criticism - by funding the necessary developments to database technology, and releasing it to the open source community.

Microsoft may be everyone's favourite computing villain, but now that Google is a billion-dollar internet corporation, Google needs to set itself apart by practice, not philosophy - an end point that Krzysztof Kowalczyk ends on very properly: "Not doing Evil is easy. Doing Good is the hard thing."

Gota love d'blogs

Paul Mooney — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 03:40:00 GMT

Gota love d'blogs

Do no Evil is a play on words...

Daniel — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 15:28:00 GMT

... or Hanlon's Razor to be specific which posits "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

The 'Do No Evil' statement is an idiosyncratic and puzzling choice of words for a company.

Hanlon's Razor is widely recited within the hacker community. When Google, being part of the hacker/puzzle-cult, states 'Do no evil' it probably means 'Don't be stupid'. Malicious behaviour, or 'evil', is often mistaken for the behaviour of shortsighted, uneducated individuals.

Or maybe I've read too much into it...

re: Google and Open Source

Lovejoy — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 08:44:00 GMT

I'd rather hear about Kate Bosworth than Adam Bosworth. But yeah this was a nice read. I take it with a grain of salt as you might expect, and like Bosworth said, I'm absolutely certain that Google does indeed fund, contribute to, entice, and reward the open source community, or you would have seen blogs like this a long time ago.

Stepping out a little, taking Google out of the main frame of the picture, you must realize that freeloaders are inevitable in a situation like this. Always. And the solution to this is not licenses or property rights or government intervention or regulation. The solution is active involvement and good relations with the people who are actually expending the time, energy, and resources to further these open source projects. Direct compensation is not always necessary, and the quid pro quo is not always apparent to the naked eye. It seems like Google has found a nice partnership.

Just to add, Dare, I've done my best to give you the benefit of the doubt with regard to any grudges you may hold.

re: Google and Open Source

c. keith ray — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 18:42:00 GMT

Anyone remember that the original post was asking for database flexibility, not just for google's use but for everybody who needs it?

I think the Gemstone database has some of the flexibility that Bosworth (and others) are asking for... the power comes from not being limited by the notions and historical implementations of relational databases.

Official vs. Personal Voice.

All Things Distributed — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 22:43:00 GMT

Something happened a few days ago that is related why I have trouble posting about technology issues since I have moved to Amazon. The short version is:

<blockquote>Regardless of how many disclaimers you put on your weblog that your content is private and not related to your employer, people will treat your statements as representing your company. And with the "traditional press" monitoring weblogs they will use content from weblogs as representing company statements.
</blockquote>

About a week ago Adam Bosworth wrote <a href="http://www.adambosworth.net/archives/000038.html">a posting</a> on that database vendors/developers need to address their customers needs for dynamic schema and partitioning, and for improving indexing. He ended the post with challenging the open source community to address these problems in their projects and beat the commercial vendors to it.

For a large part I agree with Adam, there is a real need for databases to address the changing user requirements. And I understand his challenge to the OS community as it would be great to see this development happen in the open, in a way that all developers can contribute and benefit. At least that was the way I interpreted his post.

There was an interesting <a href="http://blog.kowalczyk.info/archives/2004/12/29/google-we-take-it-all-give-nothing-back/">polemic posting</a> that portrayed Adam's posting as an official Google statement, and that Google wanted the OS community to solve their problems without giving anything back, and lots of discussion erupted over that posting. It was interesting to see the conversation evolving, as I was sure this was not at all what Adam intended.

Things however got completely out of hand when Dare Obasanjo (MS) referenced the original post and the counter-post and <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/dareobasanjo/archive/2004/12/30/344469.aspx">added some opinion</a> to it. Adam <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/dareobasanjo/archive/2004/12/30/344469.aspx#344711">in a comment</a> at Dare's weblog blasted Dare's posting, and compared Microsoft (one of his former employers) to Nazis. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law">Godwin's Law</a> says that you should not take such a statement serious, it is just an indication that reasonable debate has finished.

Why is this relevant? Because yesterday <a href="http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=4eef2e6d-560a-4edf-84bc-dfcc7aa5752b">the exchange appeared in the Wall Street Journal</a> (they were wise enough to leave out the Nazis though) (the link is to the transcript at Dares weblog, as the regular WSJ is paid subscription only).

A number of things happened in the conversational exchange that shows that we do not honor the 'weblogs are personal' principle at all.
<ul>
<li>Adam's original post was distorted and portrayed as Google's view that software should be free.</li>
<li>He had no other option but to respond with additional post and comments to trying and clarify that Google is doing good stuff for the OS community. Remember that this was not the gist of his original post, but he is forced to defend his employer.</li>
<li>No matter what thoughts Adam had on being screwed by a part of the weblog community, he added to the controversial by countering Dare's post rather forceful (including Nazi's, Swiss and refugees) and indirectly turning it into a Google vs Microsoft fight.</li>
<li>The Wall Street Journal then reports on this in an article starting with "The rivalry between Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. has been heating up ..."</li>
</ul>

So who is respecting the "weblogs are personal statements" principle? Nobody! Everyone immediately made Adams posting into a Google statement or Google vs Microsoft battle.

As soon as you are a visible employee, every word your write will be seen as a potential statement from your company, whether you like it or not. Maybe not if you post 10 or 20 articles a day on a variety of issues, but if it is once or twice a week, which would be a more normal pattern for me, a lot of additional scrutiny needs to be applied before you write something up. I am sure Adam is going to think twice about his next posting.

This indeed forces me to also weigh my words before posting a lot more than when I was at Cornell, and this threshold is sufficient to often kill my interest in posting. Ill see what I can do to fix that, but the Adam & Dare experience is in no way reinforcing the idea that my words will be see as personal by my readers, the community at large, or even the more traditional press.

Stallmann, Free Software and Responsibility

Stefan Tilkov's Random Stuff — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 11:07:00 GMT

While I don’t agree with his views very much, I really admire Richard Stallman’s consistency. It must surely be great not to be plagued by even the slightest doubt about one’s own views as RMS is … it’a also very interesting to consider his opinion regarding the use of free software and the expectations as to what a company would...

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