Why would you assume moving to GSuite is indicative of a trend toward open-source? You have even less control than with Office.
There's an increasing amount of things you can do with G Suite, almost all our products have APIs and Apps Script libraries.
If there's something missing in our APIs, feel free to let us know.
Almost every single company I've ever seen for 20+ years has open sourced their developer SDK examples. It literally makes no sense what so ever to do anything else.
This has nothing to do with what the OP was talking about which is open sourcing the core app.
You've got to start somewhere. It starts with developer samples, moves into tools, languages (Apps Script), then sub-products.
If you're asking for Google to open source it's products in one big blow, I don't think that will happen without smaller steps. I'm on the team that would probably best start the conversation of considering G Suite in open source. Would love to hear proposals.
Even suggesting that Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides might be open source someday is as unbelievable as suggesting Google's considering open sourcing their search algorithm. But I'd love to be proven wrong.
Time will tell if it works. If yes prices will go down for everybody.
Also, Google Docs supports exporting to ODS and other document formats... in addition to automatic conversion into Google Drive.
That's debatable. According to GitHub, Microsoft is the biggest contributor to open source projects.
http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-github-open-source-...
In addition, there are quite a few high-profile open source software packages directly from Microsoft.
Sorry but this is so wrong, Google does not host any of its biggest project on github: Chromium and Android. There were articles written about this.
- A way for users to prohibit internet access per application
- no forced installation of the whole Google Play Services, just to get access to the Play Store
- better root management, so that manufacturers can ship access to root to all users
- less politics in the Play Store. Google has for example thrown out 3rd party YouTube apps that offered background playback, because those supposedly violated YouTube ToS with that, shortly before introducing a paid option for background playback in their own YouTube app.
For background data: https://ting.com/blog/ting-tip-for-android-control-which-app...
> - better root management, so that manufacturers can ship access to root to all users
Are you sure it is Android problem and not manufacturers decision, because they are afraid to be flooded with warranty issues from broken rooted phones?
> ess politics in the Play Store. Google has for example thrown out 3rd party YouTube apps that offered background playback, because those supposedly violated YouTube ToS with that, shortly before introducing a paid option for background playback in their own YouTube app.
So, these apps are illegal from law standpoint, and make damage to Google. How is this politics?
I'm dead certain that some manufacturers would still not ship root, but I'm also dead certain that more would do than do right now, if it was officially supported.
> So, these apps are illegal from law standpoint, and make damage to Google.
They're not illegal. It was never trialled whether they're illegal. Google did not sue these app developers and did not have a judge confirm that they actually violate the YouTube ToS. They just threw them out of the Play Store, with the accusation pretty much just for PR reasons.
And I'm sure that they would not have won an actual lawsuit. The point in the YouTube ToS that they accused with, basically said that you're not allowed to separate the audio from the visuals of a YouTube video. Supposedly this was in there, to have something against people pirating music through YouTube.
If this were to suddenly be interpreted as it not being legal to have any way of just listening to YouTube videos without seeing it, then tabbed browsers would be illegal, any sort of multi-tasking-capable operating system would be illegal, it could technically even be illegal for users to not adamantly stare at their screen as soon as they click on a YouTube video.
No judge would push this through and no judge would rule someone guilty for not knowing that all these seemingly accepted uses were apparently different to offering background playback in an Android app.
That Google seems to not think much of their own rules would not have helped the case either.
For starters - have you tried to use Android without Google Play Services or its reverse engineered open reimplementation, microG? Android with F-Droid is like a completely different runtime platform than Android with Google Play. It might be a nice platform, but it's different - you can't just switch without extreme changes to your habits and apps you use, even if you don't mind installing closed apps. If you say "Android is open", you really mean something completely different than most of Android users think about when hearing "Android". When they hear or say "Android", they think "Google Play's Android".
I guess they are open source but they exist to line Google's pockets with even more money