Well, 1) I wish him all the best and would love another good build tool alternative, but 2) I don't see his utopia of demonstrably making open-source building easier happening because the OS world is a bazaar, not a Google-esque cathedral.

Google's build system is awesome because it can force everyone in the company to use it, going so far as to put every single project in one huge repository.

And, then, crucially, the model assumes that any dev workstation can compile (or pull down via cache) every single upstream project.

In the non-catherdal/bazaar world, take any non-trivial Java project, and all of it's upstream dependencies, and some are built with Ant, some with Maven, some with Buildr, some with Gradle, some require thrift installed, some require who knows what installed.

And you can't just go back and add some meta-data of "oh sure, every Java project compiles src/main/java -> target"...their build files are going to have all sorts of crazy one-off steps (Maven plugins, whatever).

There is no enforcement of "you must make your build use this BUILD file, and, btw, only program in Java, Python, or C."

With all of Maven's warts, the jar-based repository with transitive dependencies is, IMO, it's major innovation. I just don't see a transitive upstream build-from-source model (like Google's) ever working in the bazaar that is Maven central.

I don't at all mean to say Maven/Maven repository are perfect--for one, it's ridiculous how many broken dependencies are in Maven central. Naively, I had thought that was automatically enforced/not allowed, but, sigh, no, we all have to deal with, say, the ASM developers completely breaking their API from v3 and v4 and forever cursing the rest of us with jar hell.