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Comment by Boulth | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand Google engineers are vendor-locked-in using Google specific tech one way or another.

Yeah the whole time I was there every time I had to use bigtable or Spanner I always muttered to myself “I wish I could be using some free software garbage instead of this proprietary Google stuff right now.” Every Googler secretly yearns for the performance, reliability, and elegance of MySQL.

You should add a /s to make this more obvious .

To be fair, quite a few engineers at Google did yearn for MySQL and a single instance at that. Not for any of the traits you list°, but because it would have let them no longer worry about HA, replication, request hedging, key hotspots, etc. It would have also meant not having a product that works when there are more than a handful of users, but that's another story. BT was a lot of work to write for and that's why Spanner evolved the way it did.

°I sense some irony

Uncool, given that Google only exist thanks to free software.

Google started as a C, Java and Python shops. Android is born out of a Linux Kernel.

If I remember well, long ago, the initial database they used was actually an in-shop fork of MySQL.

Easy to say bad things about free software now that you have billions and hundred of geniuses to work on your own stuff.

Actually, this kind of comment reminds me of the "linux is cancer" era of Microsoft. Funny like Google is now becoming the new MS now they got all the markets, while MS pretend to be nice now that they are not the top dog anymore.

I agree with you both! I don't think Google (or probably even the parent) meant to disrespect or discredit the value and contributions of open source. But internal, non-open platforms aren't really "vendor lock-in" or just NIH. They're often much of much higher quality (if you have the resources) simply by solving the exact problems you have directly.

Disclaimer: I've been bitter about MySQL-for-everything-ism lately too but think Java is pure heaven.

Um, not really. Care to elaborate? If something is available open-sourced we're typically free to use it, as long as we are abiding by the license conditions.

Not strictly true. Most software would probably require at least some modifications to run internally but as far as I know there’s no policy preventing open source software in production, quite the opposite.

For example, here’s some information about memcache: https://www.quora.com/Does-Google-use-memcached-or-does-it-u...

There’s more, but if I can’t find a reference to them on Google Search I’ll assume its not in my place to discuss it publicly.

Using protobufs as a base layer may seem like lock-in, but it very much is the opposite. Protobufs are surprisingly simple and maybe even elegant once you get past the ugly parts, but most importantly it decouples software from arbitrary protocols and makes it much easier to deal with changing implementations. (Not to mention the potential for rich backwards and forwards compatibility.)

Why? The build-or-buy trade-off is very different at Google scale and this is one of the few organizations that can build everything in-house for their specific needs.

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