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Comment by sowbug | Hacker News Reader

It's more common than you might think. Google has a very, uh, open attitude toward open-source hobby-project code contributions by employees.

See https://developers.google.com/open-source/projects for more, and if you'd like to come work for a company that lets you use 20% time to create new projects or contribute to existing projects, visit http://www.google.com/about/careers/.

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But also note this is not a hobby project. It is a full-time project by Chromium engineers (just not an official Google product).

That distinction gets very weird. If it's a full-time project, they are working on it full time? So they are being paid by Google to develop it, they do so during regular work hours, the code is owned and released by Google, yet it is not a Google product.

I understand the point you are trying to make but at some point it becomes semantics.

I think it's important to distinguish that Google is not putting the effort that they could into this project, and that the quality of the project is not what they want you to expect out of an official Google product.

ie they want to give their engineers the ability to do neat projects—projects that could potentially make money—but they don't want to back each one fully, and they don't want to have their brand tarnished if the project fails.

Yes. We* are doing this full time during regular work hours. But this is not, yet, a product that deserves to be tied to the Google brand. It is just some code and some design documents, and hopes and dreams :)

It could fail. And even if it succeeds, it isn't ever going to be a "product", but a Web Platform feature.

*Note: I am the person leading this project.

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