Google Does More Than Just Show us the Code - Still Not Convinced That This is Cool?
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This effort flies in the face of “conventional wisdom” that code must be kept closed, or proprietary, to deliver the best products and services. Nobody can doubt that Google delivers the best service in its field. The company has become so synonymous with search that whenever people talk about trying to find information about any particular topic on the Internet, instead of saying that they searched for it, they say that they “Googled” it. It is true that Google’s search algorithms are still proprietary (and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future), but sharing the tools used to build website infrastructure is still a very significant step.
Certainly, the open source community is taking this move very seriously. Eric Raymond, president emeritus and founder of the Open Source Initiative, and author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, seemed quite impressed with the effort. “This looks great. It’s great news. I’m not surprised. Google has always been a class act and it has had close ties to the open source community,” he was quoted as saying in a recent PC World article discussing Google’s release of source code.
Many observers will be watching very closely to see how this latest venture affects Google’s efficiency in its core strength –- not to mention how it affects the company’s bottom line. It might also serve as an interesting model for other companies to emulate. For example, a firm that offers a commercial product or service, but is interested in getting involved in open source, might examine how Google is approaching this endeavor. This is particularly true if the company believes, as does Google, that it has something both to gain from, and to offer to, the open source community.
It will be some time before we can appreciate the results of this action. Remember, only a relatively small community of programmers will work on the tools that Google has just released. This was intentional on Google’s part; the company wants to work out any bugs in the system with a smaller group of developers before releasing projects of more general interest. No doubt many open source developers are already looking forward to seeing what Google will release next.
For search engine optimizers, the move signals that Google is widening the net it is casting to help it become the best search engine it can. While it is true that conventional wisdom insists that code must remain closed to deliver the best commercial products and services, many open source projects have been recognized as among the best in their fields by those who voted with their feet. One need only consider how many sites run the Apache Web server to see this. For those of you who are open source fans, it’s more than worth it to point your browser to http://code.google.com/ and check out just how cool a search engine company can be.
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