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Comment by rbarooah | Hacker News Reader

"Unlike Google, you see, Facebook has been known to promptly open-source some of the most important pieces of its back-end infrastructure."

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Is this actually inaccurate though? Google has released tons of open source software, but which of them are important pieces of its back-end infrastructure? Hadoop and all its sub-projects are inspired by Google papers but aren't based on Google code, as far as I know. The projects that come to mind are Sawzall (of dubious usefulness to people outside Google), gold linker, possibly Go language (but I don't know to what extent that's used within Google), and what else? Probably a lot of contributions to open-source that it uses, like the Linux kernel, but I'm after whole projects created by Google. Python doesn't count because it was already open source before they acquired GvR.

Compare to Facebook, which has open-sourced Cassandra, Hive, HipHop, Thrift, Tornado, and others which I may be forgetting. Seems to me that Facebook is way ahead.

Edit: just remembered a Protocol Buffers, that's a good one to put under Google's column.

Google has a lot of smaller projects that are very useful and well-written:

- Closure Compiler for Javascript: http://code.google.com/closure/compiler/

- Sparse hashtable: http://goog-sparsehash.sourceforge.net/

- Chromium

- Android

- V8 JS engine

- WebM

And this more comprehensive list: http://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label:google

Right. None of which you could reasonably describe as "the most important pieces of its back-end infrastructure," unlike HipHop, Thrift, HBase, Cassandra, memcache, etc. at Facebook. Google has contributed a ton of wonderful products to open source; however they will never contribute BigTable, MapReduce, GFS, Chubby, GoogleBot, their indexing pipeline, the actual reverse index query execution engines, the search engine aggregators, Spanner, etc.

If you think about it, this is all perfectly sensible. Google sees back-end technology as a key competitive differentiator. Facebook needs to build back-end technology, too, but is not as vulnerable to a technologically equal competitor; if we were, Google would have made good on their promise to destroy us by now.

Disclaimer: I'm a Facebook engineer who contributes to the HipHop effort.

i guess thats all true. i think the release of the go language will prove to be a huge milestone for google both in terms of open source releases and in terms of projects by googlers.

You're correct, but I think the article's statement is misleading.

I'm not personally a fan but isn't GWT an open sourcing of what the use to build gmail, etc? http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/

"No one is using BigTable or the Second Coming of the Google File System. Except for Google."

I've never read anything from theregister before, but is this really what to expect?

Yes, they're a self-described IT tabloid. It can be entertaining but usually falls short.

And the link is to Caffeine-- Google's new indexing system. It seems really crazy. Like saying:

"Facebook's servers are running blazingly fast PHP code and they're not even using Android, Google's operating system for cheap hardware."

Very useful projects like Protocol Buffers & Gtest (unit-testing framework) come to mind..

This irked me, Google has contributed quite a bit to the open source world.

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