Google Open Source Practices
The cluster focuses on debates about Google's policies and challenges in open sourcing projects, including infrastructure dependencies, employee-driven OSS under Google GitHub, project abandonment concerns, and examples like Go, Flutter, and Kubernetes.
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Doesn't Google only open source projects when they don't want to spend any more time working on them?
Isn't it open source regardless and a lot of the maintainers are not google devs?
Does anyone know why google didnt open source it?
My guess is that it uses too much of Google's core infrastructure for them to open source ... so the answer is probably going to be "No" no matter how many people sign.
Any Googler can write code and open source it on the Google GitHub (within reason, the process is quite straightforward). So no, Google as an entity does not official endorse it, all it means is at least one employee is working on that particular effort.
Plenty of opensource projects are in google3(that frequently gets merged into external)
how can something published on the Google github repo not be a product of Google..?
Unfortunately most Google software is practically inseparable from Google's infrastructure. Open sourcing stuff is hard, mostly thankless work.
Is there some reason why Google can't spin it off into an open source project of some kind?
I'm a Googler, opinions are my own.A lot of the times engineers at Google will open source libraries or tools they have worked on, which go under the Google GitHub repo, but are attached with that language. This is basically saying that it is owned by Google but it is not something Google is officially supporting. It may continue to get updates, it may not. I've definitely seen some libraries open sourced from Google, that stopped being pushed externally once the primary driver behi