Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What is Google doing with its open source teams?

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 339 posts

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#81

Post by dgacmu »

CHY872 wrote: post #69
DefineOutside wrote: post #3

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.

Ah, this is a bit of a false one. (A)GPL's pretty great for things that look like applications (or alternatively, pretty much anything GNU's ever made), but for anything looking like a library that is designed to be both free as in speech and free as in beer (Qt is the former but not the latter - want commercial usage? Pay us for a differently licensed edition!) it's a complete non-starter because it says that any us…

This is entirely correct. Open sourcing tensorflow was about getting the world to use Google's stuff so that that stuff became more valuable / remained valuable / was possible to hire people with experience in it, not about getting people to work on it for free. The ratio of external to internal contributions is extremely small.

Google saw what happened with other of their technologies like map reduce (not open sourced, the world reinvented in Hadoop and the progress started happening there instead of in MR) and wanted to avoid becoming the bit player in a space they pioneered in. It's a reasonable strategy. (The risk is that you're giving away something that could be a competitive advantage.)

(worked on tensorflow at Google for four years.)

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#82

Post by derefr »

mike_d wrote: post #34
bushbaba wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pichai never fully supported google cloud either. The fact google cloud exists is thanks to Amit Singh’s leadership. Palo Alto networks is lucky to have such a visionary CBO at their helm.

Google should have never been in the cloud business to start with. It is a race to the bottom, and revenue depends on your ability to scale up staff - a model Google doesn't have in any of it's other businesses.

What does a company with huge datacenters do to reclaim OpEx from committed compute capacity sitting idle at non-peak periods, other than building an IaaS with idle-load-consuming services (e.g. spot instances, cloud functions, other short-lived workloads)? Do you expect them to mine Bitcoin?

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#83

Post by adra »

spinningslate wrote: post #23

I've no inside knowledge on Google, so can't comment on the rationale for selecting those being let go. From the outside though, Google under Pichai increasingly looks like Microsoft under Ballmer in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Balmer was lauded for delivering good numbers from a dominant market position. That was fine - until it wasn't. Under his watch, Microsoft completely misjudged the internet and totally missed…

Microsoft didn't miss mobile, they supported many or all verticals of mobile probably 10 years before it ever really took off. They absolutely bungled it and pulled 3-4 various strategies that all seemed to fall flat by miss-judging the market or self defeating strategies to protect their other products/partners.

I do see some similarities with the companies though. It's hard to say or blame this on CEOs, but rather a maturity of companies that no longer have founder CEOs and how that changes the nature of people's interactions from top to bottom.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#84

Post by CHY872 »

dgacmu wrote: post #81
CHY872 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, this is a bit of a false one. (A)GPL's pretty great for things that look like applications (or alternatively, pretty much anything GNU's ever made), but for anything looking like a library that is designed to be both free as in speech and free as in beer (Qt is the former but not the latter - want commercial usage? Pay us for a differently licensed edition!) it's a complete non-starter because it says that any us…

This is entirely correct. Open sourcing tensorflow was about getting the world to use Google's stuff so that that stuff became more valuable / remained valuable / was possible to hire people with experience in it, not about getting people to work on it for free. The ratio of external to internal contributions is extremely small. Google saw what happened with other of their technologies like map reduce (not open sourc…

K8s another example. Kind of amazing that Google effectively owns the now-standard deployment solution off of 'we don't really use K8s but want you to build your applications like us and K8s is a bit like something we do use'. At least Tensorflow's actually what Google runs internally (to best of my knowledge)!

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#85

Post by ed25519FUUU »

> These are not the people anyone in their right mind, or HR container, would want to fire. They are open source movers and shakers. In open source leadership circles, they're people everyone knows and are happy to work with.

That’s good for us that they were let go. Google sucked them up and nailed their feet to the floor with amazing comp.

Now they’ll innovate elsewhere.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#86

Post by sombragris »

bbor wrote: post #36

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…

Okay, but then, why fire such rockstars as Di Bona and Allison?? These are not coasters.

AT&T and whatever company inherited the Bell Labs might have done rounds after rounds of layoffs but never fired Dennis Ritchie, for example.

People such as DiBona and Allison are assets to any company who can afford to hire them. This is simply unexplainable.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#87

Post by fidgewidge »

adra wrote: post #83
spinningslate wrote: post #23

I've no inside knowledge on Google, so can't comment on the rationale for selecting those being let go. From the outside though, Google under Pichai increasingly looks like Microsoft under Ballmer in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Balmer was lauded for delivering good numbers from a dominant market position. That was fine - until it wasn't. Under his watch, Microsoft completely misjudged the internet and totally missed…

Microsoft didn't miss mobile, they supported many or all verticals of mobile probably 10 years before it ever really took off. They absolutely bungled it and pulled 3-4 various strategies that all seemed to fall flat by miss-judging the market or self defeating strategies to protect their other products/partners. I do see some similarities with the companies though. It's hard to say or blame this on CEOs, but rather…

Did they misjudge the market? Windows CE was quite popular in the smartphone segment before iOS and Android steamrollered every existing incumbent. The idea that having a computer in your pocket was important, that was classic 90s era Gatesism and they were right on target.

Microsoft lost (not missed) mobile because the Windows team had been losing the ability to execute competently. iOS was essentially macOS for mobile, and Windows wasn't competitive with macOS on the desktop and still isn't today so it wasn't a big surprise that they couldn't pull off great results on mobile either. For as long as the mobile playing field didn't have the most competent companies doing software they could be the leader but once Apple/Google showed up the piles of tech debt and general apathy got the better of them.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#88

Post by Nzen »

deanCommie wrote: post #65
ethbr0 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anybody who's not Amazon didn't get into the cloud business for profit: they did it for survival. Post-AWS launch, writing was on that wall that amortizing your (already large) infrastructure costs across paying customers would be the only way to afford a certain scale and geographic distribution of hardware that was a prerequisite to taxing future value.

AWS was built from the ground up on new infrastructure. There was no reuse of existing Amazon infrastructure except tooling. The whole "selling excess Q4 capacity" was a myth. https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/Amazon-web-services goes into it in great detail.

Miscapitalized url, should be [0]. However, the page is mostly metadata pointing at a 2 hour youtube video [1].

[0] https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/amazon-web-services

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APvj15_YCqk

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#89

Post by dtech »

CHY872 wrote: post #69
DefineOutside wrote: post #3

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.

Ah, this is a bit of a false one. (A)GPL's pretty great for things that look like applications (or alternatively, pretty much anything GNU's ever made), but for anything looking like a library that is designed to be both free as in speech and free as in beer (Qt is the former but not the latter - want commercial usage? Pay us for a differently licensed edition!) it's a complete non-starter because it says that any us…

Nice to see MPL mentioned. I always find it strange MPL isn't used more, it's such a reasonable middle ground between AGPL and MIT/BSD.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#90

Post by [deleted] »

jahewson wrote: post #66
mike_d wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertising is way more profitable than AWS. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasongoldberg/2022/02/04/amazon...

> While Amazon did not disclose the operating income generated from their ad business, it is almost certainly bigger than the income generated by AWS Not exactly making a strong case.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN