'Open' has very little to do with anything Google does
marco.org
marco.org
Everything in modern technology infringes patents. When building some machines a few years ago, just out of curiosity, I looked up patents on motor control. Things that have been standard practice in the industry, and are described in 30-year old text books, had been patented just the year before I looked them up.
Those who support patents for software and electronics are the worst kind of bottom feeders.
So, Google "infringed" some patents. Boo f#$%^&g hoo!
Facebook has a good track record of contributing open source projects, (Cassandra, for example), but an arguably poor track record on openness of user data (see Vine).
Apple is tied with Microsoft for the least open company on this list. While they have a few great open source projects (like clang and webkit) iOS is a completely closed system, and their devices are closed hardware.
Amazon is a very open company, allowing other people to use components of its stack and hardware.
Microsoft is a patent bully, and windows phone/RT is just as closed as iOS.
Google, by comparison, open sources tons of software, from internal libraries (Guava, Guice, Gson) to entire platforms (Android, ChromeOS, Chromium). They also open protocols and standards such as VP8 and SPDY. They publish papers in conferences and give talks on how their company operates.
Google certainly isn't as open as it could be, but saying that "Open has very little to do with anything Google does" is clearly false.
Once they went public with stocks, they went evil.
Agreeing with companies to not poach programmers, buying start up and shutting their services down, etc...
Of course, they are also saying what is convenient for them.
Google admits its VP8/WebM codec infringes MPEG H.264 patents
http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/03/07/google-admits-its-...