X has been really good about open sourcing all of the technical information from shut down projects. They did the same for the Makani power-generating kites. Love to see stuff like this
[1] - https://x.company/blog/posts/sharing-project-amber-with-the-...
[2] - https://x.company/blog/posts/sharing-makani-with-the-world-t...
The unspoken part of that is that the changes in question should be profitable for Alphabet. Anything else is just PR for recruiting and marketing.
> "Is it a research center? An incubator? A non-profit? No, it’s a moonshot factory"
X spends huge sums of money but never takes this approach of intentionally open sourcing a project during continued development in order to tap in to eager innovators all over the world who could contribute. And I think that is unfortunate because that approach can be extremely effective for lowering the cost of things and making them accessible to people all over the world. Personally I feel like they could do this with a few small projects as it is a very cheap development methodology. It would cost them basically nothing compared to their other projects. But then you can't profit from it (as much), so it doesn't fit in to what X is doing.
Which is weird, because X is a powerful development house. They could score a lot of goodwill if they did this on a few of the right projects. And it would have kept me there. But I couldn't find anything like that.
I feel the same disappointment as you. As a child I envisioned a world where I could go work at somewhere like Google and truly use their resources to give back but every project seems in some way tainted by the underlying drive to make everything profitable for the company funding it.
Here are some flight logs they released: https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/bigquer...
They also released reports that describe their findings; it's quite detailed (here's part 1 of 3): https://storage.googleapis.com/x-prod.appspot.com/files/Maka...
I don't know what standard we're holding companies to for projects they're shutting down. From my experience, projects that are closing down don't get as much support prioritization, especially when they're deemed unsuccessful.
I share your sentiment that we could get even more; it sounds like you're seeing even more interesting things the public is not. I am grateful for what they have provided so far.
But Makani is one project, and again my only push back is whether they have been "really good" about releasing projects or whether there have been a relatively small number of notable releases.
My general feeling was that they are really almost 100% focused on profit and for the managers I met, I did not feel like they even understood the world-changing potential of open source. If your primary interest is in changing the world, you can get a LOT done with open source. Especially with the money they have. A relatively small project that releases a quality design and then continues to develop it while other people clone it in my mind has the best chance of gaining traction.
But that requires letting go of control. And I did not get the sense they were interested in that kind of thing. So I left and started my own open source project to explore this theory. In three years we have spent as much money as they would spend on a single mistake. I really wish they were more open to this kind of development, but I don't think they are really set up for it.
https://community.twistedfields.com/t/march-2022-update-simu...
So then I left and started an open source farming robot project I am really proud of:
https://community.twistedfields.com/t/march-2022-update-simu...
[1] https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=ca6c332f-2cc5...