Google’s ‘Meaning of Open’ | Hacker News Reader

Google’s ‘Meaning of Open’

daringfireball.net

80 pointsseldo38 comments

First of all, I still think Google is a cool company and contributing a lot to the open source ecosystem.

But Google advocating openness and doing so by talking about data, protocols and software is disingenuous. Google's core business is pushing advertising using search and data mining. Things that they are anything but open about. Also, Google regularly open-sources software (which is great), but doesn't make any real effort to further develop that software using open-source communities. Have you tried to push a patch back into a Google open source project? (If so, write a blog post and link it here, please). Development on open-source projects in Google happens inside Google, with changes periodically being pushed to the outside world. For the most part this is a one-way street. Still not complaining here, btw - community development is tricky and I don't see other companies really make an effort to release control to 'communities' (hello Sun/Java!).

Google's open-source efforts only indirectly affect their bottom line. What they really do is make it harder for their competitors and garner public goodwill.

Google also makes a big deal out of control. That users control their own data and can take it out of the Googlesphere at any time. Great! Can I have Google remove all the personal data they've collected on me that I didn't explicitly give them? Uh, sorry - no go there. All that really personal stuff doesn't fall under your control.

I'd expect any company to behave in such a manner (or worse, actually), but Google presents itself as a beacon of goodness, openness and generally never Evil. As such we hold them to a higher standard which they can't live up to. So a sanctimonious sermon on being good and open just hits some people the wrong way.

Not me, of course. I'm a bit of a cynic and get a few giggles out of a shot of blatant hypocrisy.

It's not timely at all, but I maintained the 64-bit patch for Gears for a few months. Upstream didn't want to support it and wouldn't release it as "unsupported" for whatever reason.

And please don’t worry your pretty little minds about things like Google’s search or ad algorithms or the specific details of how its data centers work

Secrecy about search and ad algorithms are understandable - opening both would negatively impact their end-users. Regarding the the structure of their data centers, this charge is just plain false. Google is significantly more open about the structure of their computation than I would have ever imagined them to be, see:

http://friendfeed.com/paul/944f24c4/great-systems-presentati...

and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=949301

I don't think Gruber's upset that Google isn't open about these things — it's more than they claim to be open about everything, but clearly aren't. He's calling Rosenberg out on his propaganda-like march of "Google is always open no matter what"

But Rosenberg's blog post never says "Google is always open no matter what". Relevant quotes:

These are the things we should be doing. In many cases we aren't there, but I hope that with this note we can start working to close the gap between reality and aspiration.

and

While we are committed to opening the code for our developer tools, not all Google products are open source. Our goal is to keep the Internet open, which promotes choice and competition and keeps users and developers from getting locked in. In many cases, most notably our search and ads products, opening up the code would not contribute to these goals and would actually hurt users. The search and advertising markets are already highly competitive with very low switching costs, so users and advertisers already have plenty of choice and are not locked in. Not to mention the fact that opening up these systems would allow people to "game" our algorithms to manipulate search and ads quality rankings, reducing our quality for everyone.

So as you are building your product or adding new features, stop and ask yourself: Would open sourcing this code promote the open Internet? Would it spur greater user, advertiser, and partner choice? Would it lead to greater competition and innovation?

I think the actual argument is bad anyway. Open-sourcing their product is a bad idea because malicious people will read the code and exploit its flaws? This is security by obscurity and it will not promote the open internet. I don't think it's wrong but it's not altruistic either.

Yes, open sourcing how their search algorithm works would destroy the relevance of their search rankings. There's a multi-billion SEO market reverse engineering those algorithms.

Right, but there isn't a multi-billion-dollar market in reverse engineering AES, because it's published. And we all use it and it's fine - publication hasn't weakened it at all.

AES does something completely different though. AES wants to make an insignificant change to the input result in a disproportionate change in the output.

Any kind of scoring system where scoring ended up being essentially random like this would be useless. And any scoring system that's useful and open will tell you just how to increase your score.

"they claim to be open about everything"

You're mischaracterizing the memo so you can argue with it, which, incidentally, is exactly what Gruber did. Though so often incorrectly used on the internet, this, folks, is a genuine "strawman" argument.

Essentially, he claims that open source code is high quality code, except Google's own closed source search and ad products, where opening it will reduce its quality. But isn't that the point of "open source" in the first place?

I don't understand the hate at this memo. Isn't it a fact that Google is much more open and a much more prolific contributor to the open source community than its main competitors?

Humans have a biological distaste for hypocrisy and bullshit, even if the entity spouting them is generally better than those against which it is being compared.

So what you're saying is don't commit to anything unless you're perfect. Got it.

What I'm saying is that humans might react more negatively to your failings than you might expect if you believed humans were coldly rational beings, especially if those failings conflict directly with what you say you believe.

Honestly I thought this was common knowledge.

You mean "percieved" failings. I think they should have put the point concerning their search and ads products in bold & at the top.

In my experience ad-hom attacks are a knee-jerk reaction to an argument that isnt easily refuted. From your language it sounded like you agree with the attacks.

Google's recent post 'defining openness' seems to be drawing a lot of criticism from Hacker News, both directly in comments, and indirectly in the tone of articles that are posted.

First, please recognize that this in an internal memo we are getting a glimpse of. It's a "Hey guys, I know we've been talking a lot about open, here's what I think you should strive to put into a product if you're going to use open to describe the product."

You think it makes Google look perfect? This is an internal memo! He's talking to the troops, have you ever heard a pep talk that started with "We kinda failed on that do no evil thing didn't we?"?

Second, the author specifically mentions why Google doesn't open up certain things, it wouldn't be beneficial. If you don't agree with his reasoning, then fine, but at least we know the reasoning (although it's not hard to figure out on your own).

I simply cannot understand the kind of person that gets angry at Google when they open source some products but not others. How many products has Microsoft open sourced? Yes Google's motives are based on profit, all of our motives are. The point is I'm excited for Android, Go, and Chrome. They have raised the bar in quality software and I couldn't care less how ads find their way to my blog or why Wikipedia is the first search result on any topic.

An internal memo put on a publicly accessible blog ceases to be internal. It becomes part of PR.

Internal memos appear on publicly accessible blogs all the time :)

But in this case they put it on the official company blog, and that makes it PR.

why are we even discussing a small rant like this? if we're to discuss rosenberg's note, maybe that should be the link instead.

Personally, I think Gruber did a pretty good job of distilling it.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/meaning-of-open.html

There should be a way to merge "duplicates" posts by people with karma above certain threshold. For example, this could have been merged with Chris Dixson's post from this morning.

I think their implicit assertion that a transparent advertising market is bad for the public is completely false and self-serving. Let's be honest folks, Google's ad market is their biggest product, by FAR.

An opaque market serves only to push each customer as close as possible to their maximum price and benefit Google as much as possible, while providing the consumer (even a very inquisitive tech-minded consumer) no insight whatsoever about how much companies are willing to pay for their eyeballs.

I cant but help feeling that the author (who I usually find quite effusive) has read the HN/[insert other news site here] thread, scanned the article briefly and then ranted.

I'd have expected something a bit more insightful here :( (regardless of if he is right/wrong)

Now republish the same article on an Apple blog and see what John Gruber thinks of it.

He doesn't blindly praise Apple. Read DF with less prejudice and you'd spot many posts where he decries Apple.

He'd probably rip it apart just as much or even more. You have seen him get pissed off over the app store policies a million times right?

I bet he's a fan of Apple's model of openness, right?

He probably doesn't like hypocrisy.

Your assertion is also an ad hominem. You can have a person that likes Google and its products and that hates this "open" letter. You can also have a person that hates Google because of its displayed hypocrisy from times to times and still likes Apple ... it's perfectly acceptable.

Not everyone is for "openness" and not everyone should be. Surely some economic, business or social models work better that way, but there's no way to tell if its the "be all / end all" since most models crack when it comes to scaling.

And Google is displaying some hypocritical behavior here since the crown jewels that actually generate money are closed. That isn't bad (they are a business after all) ... but confusing and damaging users is not the reason, and sending signals like that is just dishonest.

(although I've experienced working in a corporate setting before ... that man may actually be honest ... sniffing the company's values like cocaine is actually quite common :)

what he said^^^.

Clicking the little ^ arrow does a better job of conveying that. This kind of commenting is frowned upon around here.

You surely can derive a series of conclusions from one simple and, in some circles, naive question.

Merry Christmas.

He's been a pretty outspoken critic of Apple app store policies

Not really. While he's not comically over-the-top pro-Apple like RoughlyDrafted, I haven't really read anything where he says something actually bad about Apple. Usually its something along the lines of "Apple is pretty awesome and better than anyone, but they should tweak this thing a bit".

Who hasn't been an critic of Apple's app store policies? That's not much of an argument.

I agree with MrRage that this is not a valid argument in this case. There's where he's drawn the line to "attack" Apple and, at the same time, protect himself from being labeled as the "ultimate fanboy". His criticism of the Apple Store's policy is just a last resort for cases like this.

Really? Because every post I've seen where he acknowledges app store shortcomings ends something like "But Phil is a really great guy and he promises to make things better soon, so Apple is still awesome."

Yes, exactly. He clearly likes Apple but is still willing to call them out when they do terrible things. Which is the opposite of what the parent comment was implying.

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