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.
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Saucy Sourcing 