The grandparent was criticizing people who contribute to the AMP open source project.
Even if it's getting a bug fixed to make your own site work, would it be better for it to be closed source?
Even if it's getting a bug fixed to make your own site work, would it be better for it to be closed source?
"Open source" is just a useful fiction in this case: what would a fork of AMP even do? It does however make the project corporately palatable to others that might want to implement it (i.e. Microsoft/Bing), plus it attracts unpaid contributions to fix the work of Google's highly paid engineers ("Building the future web, together."). The former might be necessary but the latter is extremely problematic IMO.
Google could have set up AMP as an independent W3C group (for e.g.) at arms length from its competitive interests, but it didn't, and recent AMP product announcements show us why.
Community ownership and independent standards committees are not a requirement of open source. As long as forking is allowed, as a project owner, you're within your rights to veto any change. Consider Python ("Benevolent Dictator for Life") and Linux. Or for a smaller project, consider Elm.
It's not unusual for employees and volunteers to work together. Furthermore, the "volunteers" are often employees of a different company.
But as per GP's point, what would forking the project do? Who other than Google is positioned to host an AMP fork, and why would they choose to do so?
The centralized nature of the project makes it hard to understand what the point of it being open-source is, apart from being good PR and getting free work done on it.
I agree that you'd lose some benefits, but it's still an interesting web framework.
only contributed because my employer was lockedin into using AMP for the perverse SEO incentive.