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Comment by brainless | Hacker News Reader

This article states quite an impressive list of open source tools that Google has released for years in the past. This is no surprise coming from* them. Google has released some large pieces of source in other domains as well, Chromium comes to mind, which probably impacts most Internet users directly.

The question is not about Google but about OpenAI.

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I think more than benevolence of GOOG it is about strategic OSS to commoditize your complements.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

Google also has released Guice/Dagger for Java dependency injection. Angular never really took off, but guice/dagger are widely used. Also I am pretty impressed with Flutter as an alternative to react native.

Angular was incredibly popular for a long time and still is. Usage is shifting down over time but a lot of notable websites still use it.

I have a different take, Google releases a lot but is also a massive company and tools like Chromium serve to increase their stock price so they can hit their quarterly estimates.

In what way does chromium increase stock price? In what way does stock price influence quarterly estimates? Are we playing business words mad libs?

I don't know why people like yourself respond with such derisive commentary instead of simply asking the constructive question.

Initially? It fueled dethroning MSFT and help gain marketshare for Chrome. On a go-forward basis it allows Google to project massive weight in standards. In extension to its use with Chrome, Chrome is a significant knob for ad revenue that they utilize to help meet expectations. That knob only exists because of its market share.

> “Our best shot at making the quarter is if we get an injection of at least [redacted]% , queries ASAP from Chrome.” (Google Exec)

Isn’t there a whole anti-trust case going on around this?

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/24/business/goog...

Chromium is open source because its roots are as a fork of WebKit (Safari). Which itself was open source because it was a fork of KHTML from KDE.

Google stood on the shoulders of others to get out a browser that drives 80% of their desktop ad revenue.

How does that not affect GOOG?

It was not at all done for the good of the web, it was a mere logical calculation; it was cheaper to develop Chromium, than to pay 4B USD in search royalties to Microsoft Internet Explorer, and would give more control and long-term safety to Google.

Did you miss a footnote with your asterisks?

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