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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

I knew Chris DiBona quite well. While I don't know the whole community as well so this is a rash statement, it's hard to imagine anyone knowing more about open source than Chris does.

And Chris, if you're reading this: you rock, man.

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I've known Cat Allman (one of the other folks laid off) since we worked together 23 years ago. She's one of the kindest, most thoughtful people, and exceptional at her job. This is a huge loss for both Google and the Open Source community.

Knowing Cat I'm sure she'll land somewhere that let's her continue to be just as spectacular and involved as ever, but it's still is awful for her.

I only worked with Chris on a few occasions, and those interactions had been very pleasant -- he was in a relatively high ranking position and definitely had a lot of responsibilities, but he still communicated plainly and treated everyone like a peer. I wish him the best.

Using a throwaway account for obvious reasons:

The insider perspective seems a bit more textured, as coworkers current and former have confided the last couple of days. Yes, this man was the face of a lot of things good, but he did steamroll (with his Segway no less) people along the way in a manner that doesn’t seem to be normal corporate acrimony. I can’t judge other people’s experiences, so I won’t.

I’ve only had a few direct experiences with the man. I was personally neutral until a specific incident: he cornered me and coerced me to sign over rights to an open source project that predated my employment to a third party. Having his job level and entire department lorded over me was an asymmetric power play.

Nevertheless, I’m not happy to see him laid off, mainly because nobody deserves the indignity of such a layoff.

- Your Average Xoogler

> he cornered me and coerced me to sign over rights to an open source project that predated my employment to a third party

I'm really curious as to the motivation and background to this. How much can you tell us without revealing your identity?

As a small person, I have zero desire to invite recrimination from anyone. This is not a comment about the person the thread concerns. It is a small world and industry.

My only intention was to provide a little bit more nuanced depth to the original conversation. It’s not just puppies and rainbows. People and organizations are complex and operate in shades of gray.

Xoogler here as well. A similar thing has happened me in the past. He threatened to shut down my personal repos by sending a DMCA notice to GitHub. Admittedly, those weren't released on my personal account by getting open source team's approval (it was a small Kubernetes related tool and I happened to work on Kubernetes at the time, so one can argue it's work related, but it really wasn't). As a junior engineer, it was asymmetric power play, and a level of threat/confrontation I did not have at any point during my time at Google for many years.

That said, Chris has done many great things for open source at Google and the open communities around the world overall (he oversaw many programs like Summer of Code, open source peer bonuses etc as well) so I'm sorry to see the best OSPO team out there getting gutted like this.

Many moons ago, Chris wanted to recruit me to work on video compression/streaming (this was I think before they acquired Youtube). He found out I was a big Pythonista, an up-and-coming language at the time.

Chris then invited me to meet at a playground where our kids could play and we could talk tech. He also brought along his colleague, Guido Van Rossum! We had a fun chat but in the end I decided bigco was not for me.

No regrets.

It’s such a unfathomably stupid decision that I thought I was misunderstanding what had happened when I saw it.

This is 100% truth. Chris does rock! Unfathomable.

They let him go??? That's... Words fail.

Google was supposed to have the capacity to stick to a long-term vision because the founders retained preferred stock with (IIRC) 10x voting rights.

By that same token, there is no one to blame but the founders now that Google has turned into another mediocre big corporation without vision.

Like Apple, they have a vision for $$$

Every for profit cares about money. The issue is that Google has struggled to try to come up with a new product that convinced people to give it money.

Alternative take: when I was there he was tyrannical and constantly blocking employees from open sourcing code developed on their own weekends and evenings, purely on a personal whim. People had to fight internal battles to get like little video games and stuff put up on github. You'd think head of OSPO would do whatever it took to get code open sourced but no far from it. Loads of grumbling about how he was just an ex-Slashdot editor who couldn't even code, on a power trip abusing contract ip clauses.

That couldn’t be further from my experience of working with Chris on open source at google for the last 13 years.

I remember him from The Screensavers as a teenager!

This is pretty much the only comment I'm going to reply to (I'm technically a google employee until march 31st) and just say how pleased I am to see this. The Screensavers was so much fun to do, Leo, Morgan and the crew were just terrific, and made it very easy for me to look like I knew what I was doing.

Thanks for watching!

And you and all those guys are what made a lot of us feel like there was a community out there for us— so thanks very much as well!

I reported to Chris, can confirm gg.

Linus Tovard know more than him ?

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