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Comment by DEinspanjer | Hacker News Reader

::sigh:: Would love to see this thing in detail and work on it. Frustrating that some of the most promising and interesting technologies in Google (e.g. BigTable) come out of there only in whitepaper or spec form. I can see several business advantage reasons for them to do so, but still... frustrating.

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From experience (and MMM), let's say writing the software takes X mandays of effort.

Making it run, and then run well inside a single organization with that organizations workload is 3x multiplier.

Turning it into something that can be sold to a large number of customers is at least another 3-10x multiplier.

One of the reasons Google is not releasing it is because they have no incentive to invest that 3-10x multiplier.

You might be interested to learn about Analytics, AppEngine, Predictions API, Developer Storage, and I/O 2012 is a few weeks away...

To be fair, a SIGMOD paper is much more detailed than a white paper. But perhaps you said that because the Google page only links to the presentation from the conference, not the paper itself. You can find that here: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2213954

edit: oddly, it appears that the "full-text" pdf that the ACM has is just the abstract. So I can't get at the full paper, either. Sorry about that.

If you check http://www.sigmod.org/2012/, it appears this was an "industrial presentation" and not a full paper submission.

It's an industrial presentation. As such, there's no paper about it, just the talk given at SIGMOD and the slides. When Google unveiled Megastore, F1 predecessor, it did it as an industrial presentation too. Years, and many improvements later, they published a paper on Megastore.

Most of the awesome software running the WWW is running in tightly sealed compartments, hidden away from our sight.

Imagine being able to see Google's search engine source code. That'd be truly something.

Unfortunately market forces are still pretty much in control of much of the world's most interesting software.

I've not seen it, but I'd be willing to bet their search engine code is a mess.

The reason for this: almost all single purpose software is a complete disaster area. (And a massive proportion of other stuff isn't much better). As long as it works within certain parameters then there really is no need to fix it up.

except that Google's algorithms are being constantly tweaked and improved. Crap code is only left alone as is when it won't be touched anymore. If the code being crap makes your day to day hard, the best bet would be to refactor (given that you have the money and time, which Google has).

Well, wait 5 years and someone will have a working copy (Apache Foundation or someone else) :( oh well

And another 5 years for the even-remotely-production-usable 2.0 release.

and another 5 years to get hardware running with the performance characteristics of the original software.

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