Google for president
Derek Zoolander “Or did you think I’d be too stupid to know what a eu-google-y was?” (with apologies to Drake Sather and Ben Stiller, the writers of Zoolander).
A key issue that I have noticed with open source is that it is not aimed at a niche online market. For open source to work effectively it needs to be embraced by a large number of people. The ’sharing is caring’ idea requires lots of people to share as well as to use.
So far for open source that seems to be working well. So much so that Mozilla is on the brink of releasing an analytics system that can use only 1% (of Mozilla’s 17% of the total browser market) of its user information and still have valuable and accurate Internet usage stats.
But still the open source guys can’t do it all themselves. They need support from a big brother that is willing to give them a hand up. And that’s what Google is proving itself to be.
In a blogpost earlier this month, Google security team engineer, Will Drewry said that the company’s engineers “are encouraged to contribute both software and time to open source efforts”. To the extent that Google are now backing an open source security team: Open Source Computer Emergency Response Team (oCERT). oCERTworks on filling up and securing gaps in open source systems that could be unsecure for users.
It’s a good thing that Google is helping smaller spheres of digital development. Up till now I had strong personal suspicions that Google was becoming the Googlezon of our nightmares, but if they help the small guy who wants to share free stuff they might not be so bad. I just hope they don’t buy them all out in the end.
A few big companies also support Open-source projects, like Sun released Java as open source sometime back. The really cool bonus that Open-source provides some businesses is the means by which to commoditize software thereby making it easier for the businesses to sell what they really make cash from. For example, it is speculated in some circles that Sun tries making software as freely available as possible because this helps them sell more servers. Sun makes most of its money from selling hardware. A business like Microsoft on the other hand makes money from software so they try influence the price of hardware like PCs to go down. This idea is just speculation (who knows what the real business motives are), but it sort of makes sense.
However this idea doesn’t entirely fit with Google’s model because sometimes they seem to try commoditize both hardware and software; the android phone platform may be an example. Maybe they try make both hardware and software as freely available as possible so they can advertise more, which where they really make their money.
Thamsanqa
May 20, 2008
I agree that Google is probably doing it to make money in some way, but as I see it that’s not a problem. They’re benefiting but so are oCERT and the OS movement so then it’s fine… as long as Google arn’t the exclusive money makers
lindseyberry
May 21, 2008
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