71–80 of 339 posts
I knew Chris DiBona quite well. While I don't know the whole community as well so this is a rash statement, it's hard to imagine anyone knowing more about open source than Chris does. And Chris, if you're reading this: you rock, man.
As a google employee (who obviously has no privileged info) I really don’t buy this whole activist-investor explanation for the layoffs. Besides the fact that the investors in question own I’m much more convinced by the argument that they saw this sector-wide wave of layoffs as an opportunity to scare their engineers and change the culture to be a more intense, hierarchical one. Google engineering culture has long be…
There’s an assumption made often on HackerNews and elsewhere in tech circles that Google is special and not like other companies. These layoffs show that this is not true. Google is a large corporation, like many others. There’s no grand conspiracy. Nothing unusual is going on. Layoffs can seem random. They’re often done to appease investors or to clean house or both. A lot of Googlers and ex Googlers seem to be reel…
That said you’re right that there’s no conspiracy, and I think I gave the wrong impression in my initial comment. Assuming my guess is right, leadership has been loudly and repeatedly telling employees to work harder with phrases like “you should sharpen your focus” and “you should adjust to this new economic reality”, which imo are as close to “work more” as you can get without coming up against CA labor laws
As a google employee (who obviously has no privileged info) I really don’t buy this whole activist-investor explanation for the layoffs. Besides the fact that the investors in question own I’m much more convinced by the argument that they saw this sector-wide wave of layoffs as an opportunity to scare their engineers and change the culture to be a more intense, hierarchical one. Google engineering culture has long be…
Sundar's recent pay package tied more of his compensation to performance of GOOG relative to the rest of the S&P 100 [1, 2]. That could also be related. [1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/alphabet-links-more-ceo-p... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/20/21031629/google-ceo-sund...
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You forgot step 1.5: make contributing to open-source an unwritten rule to getting a job in the industry Full disclosure: I got my current job before I had contributed anything to open source but I was asked a lot about it while applying to companies like it's expected that you work in your free time
I think in my entire time working I haven't met anyone who has significantly contributed to open source (aside from "let me fix some bug that's annoying me in a library"), so I'm not sure how required it really is
It will be interesting to see amazing talent leave Google and build new companies and institutions now that it’s slowly being mismanaged to death.
This can only happen with funding. Is this available lately?
step one: shift the focus from free software (liberty minded software) on to "open source" software. i.e. software which you can look but not touch. step two: profit
step one: promote BSD and MIT licenses over more copyleft licenses such as GPL step two: profit from people willing to code for enterprises for free There has to be some reason that Google released PyTorch under BSD-3 by Meta and TensorFlow being released under Apache by Google.
US government policy is that software developed with public funding is a public good. Current policy encourages government software to released under the most permissive license possible (ideally Public Domain, but practically permissive licenses like MIT/BSD). GPL is farther from the Public Domain than licenses like MIT/BSD. To enter the rabbit hole of material on this topic start at https://code.gov/about/overview/introduction/.
Google has never had a particularly coherent open source strategy (look at how many repos are on the github.com/google org) and I don’t think this latest layoff says much about what the future of the strategy holds either.
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This can only happen with funding. Is this available lately?
Many there were there long time and well paid (base salary and stock) they could fund a lot themselves, if they have a good idea they care about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
step one: promote BSD and MIT licenses over more copyleft licenses such as GPL step two: profit from people willing to code for enterprises for free There has to be some reason that Google released PyTorch under BSD-3 by Meta and TensorFlow being released under Apache by Google.
Enterprises are (slower than I’d hoped) learning the value of contributing to the open source projects they use. More companies are establishing Open Source Program Offices and I expect the rate of contribution to go up. Most contribution from companies will go to software licensed under MIT/BSD/Apache. US government policy is that software developed with public funding is a public good. Current policy encourages gov…