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Comment by panny | Hacker News Reader

>When I worked at Google (2014-2018), it was easy to get permission to contribute to open source projects as long as the license was BSD, MIT, or Apache 2.0. The more restrictive licenses like GPL 2 or AGPL, I think Google either flat out denied or you had to do a lot more work to get permission.

Personally, I consider that a feature rather than a bug. There's a list of these licenses [1] and I make sure my software uses one of those on the list.

[1] https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#banned

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To avoid contributors from Google is ... a feature? What exactly is your problem with them?

They’re evil?

Microsoft was evil. A pile of GPL code winning was part of what made them stop being evil. Shipping code under Google banned licenses can be thought of as either:

1) Excluding Googlers, which isn't very nice.

2) Applying pressure to de-evil Google, which is very nice and benefits everyone.

I'd like to have a non-evil Google again. I really miss the old non-evil, brilliant Google. Organizations change.

What about 3) don't care about Google? Do I really have to consider every big company when choosing a licence for my own personal project?

No, Google employees as a whole are not evil. I feel that in 2020 we should all be aware of how bad judging whole groups for the actions of a minority are.

Google as an organisation is evil. I don’t care about their employees by virtue of that, even though they may be individually good people.

Let’s have them do work as individuals instead of Google employees.

Seems similar to a boycott. A protest of the way google operate, related either to market behavior, privacy, or aspects like their stance on software licenses.

A nonviolent, voluntary and intentional abstention from dealing with google, in order to encourage google to alter an objectionable behavior.

Google culture is toxic. Google contributors spread the toxic Google culture to everything they touch.

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