Google Does More Than Just Show us the Code - Google Loves Open Source
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So how is this exciting development a result of Google’s work environment? Well, the search engine allows and encourages its software engineers to spend one day per week –- that’s right, twenty percent of their work time –- working on their own personal projects. Many of the engineers at Google are interested in open source projects, so this website came about as part of a natural evolution process. Indeed, Chris DiBona, Google’s open source program manager, said that one of the reasons he was hired by the company was to help it interact more closely with open source developers than it has done so far.
In short, the folks at Google believe in open source. They believe that releasing the code to these software tools will benefit both themselves and the greater open source community. To back up that point, Google emphasizes in its FAQ that the programs it is releasing are not simply in active use; they are in active development. “These first projects are all current, actively maintained code straight out of our repositories, and as we improve them, those improvements will be merged into the free code base.”
Another cause for the open source community to rejoice over this site launch is that Google has no intention of stopping with these four projects. Again, according to its FAQ on the subject, “We’ve got a long list of software we want to release,” and those who are interested can subscribe to the company’s updates feed or discussion list for more news. As I pointed out above, the current projects would be of most interest to C++ and Python programmers, but you can expect future projects to appeal to a wider range of software engineers.
Indeed, Google didn't stop with those first four. As of this writing, Google has added more projects. On April 19, it added Google mMAIM, the MySQL Monitoring and Investigation Module. According to Google, its "purpose is to make a it easy to monitor and analyze MySQL servers and to easily integrate itself into any environment." On April 28, Google added three documents to the repository at Google Code that cover the Search Appliance. These documents are:
- Appliance Search Protocol: This allows customers to work with the search results from the appliance.
- Feeds Protocol: This allows customers to write a custom connector to feed data into the appliance.
- Authorization Protocol: This allows a customer web service to authorize users to access specific documents for searching in real-time, leveraging their existing security and access control environment.
You can also expect future projects to be released by Google under different forms of open source licenses. As mentioned, the first four projects are being released under the BSD 2.0 license. This is because the developers who dedicated their time to releasing the code are most comfortable with that license, particularly for these kinds of infrastructural development tools. But Google expects to also release projects under the Apache, MIT or GPL licenses.
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