The story of Google Guava and patches

Asked to sign in on iphone4s. Quite annoying and uncalled for.

1. I mean are willing to accept outside contributions of code if people submit them, and put them in the codebase if they are acceptable.

2. I have the stats, but given that the vast majority of open source projects (Google or otherwise) don't ever grow past a few people, I don't see why it would be relevant? I also don't see why it's relevant whether they work for Google or not. It's not like we require projects follow a different process for Googler committers vs non, so i don't see how it's any different from a project where the committers are all really good friends who work on an OSS project together. We also hire a lot of committers to our open source projects. I'm guessing you want to make a distinction between "corporate open source projects", and "non-corporate open source projects", but in reality, making such a distinction would be a mistake, because the typical differences are in policies and preferences, and they apply equally well to either. IE What matters is the policies the project applies to committers and contributors, not whether they all work for the same company.

3. Again, I have stats, but for the vast majority of open source projects, just because most are willing to accept them, doesn't mean anyone ever contributes. This has nothing to do with Google, of course. If you look at the hundreds of thousands of projects on say, sourceforge, you will find the number that have either at least one not-same-email-domain-as-owner committer or non-trivial LOC written by a not-same-email-domain-as-owner committer else is quite low.

4. This seems to be a governance and social issue, I don't track it formally, as it would be quite difficult to do so. It would also be wrong for us to try to force a model on folks. We give folks info about what we thinks are best practices, and in fact, free copies of the producing OSS book (Karl used to work with us :P), how they run their projects is generally up to them. We are happy to give them advise when asked, and are happy to consult in general.

If only I was a senior VP. :) There are many many Googlers who would like projects to be more open source than they are, since the company has aggressively hired people who value open culture. It's not always possible, I don't know the Android team's constraints, but I would gather if you're working with an OEM on a new secret device, they don't want hints of it leaking in the public repository. :(

The history of GWT was that it was started by Joel and Bruce and acquired by Google. Internally, at the time, Google had been using Closure Compiler and millions of lines of Javascript code, so just from inertia, there would not have been much use in the beginning, because it's not like the GMail team is going to rewrite GMail in GWT over night. Really, the first high profile consumer facing project done with GWT was Wave. AdWords is also GWT, but not very sexy.

I come from a background of using Maven to build my projects, and Google's internal build system is somewhat maven like, but it doesn't let you specify versions in dependencies, so you always end up depending on HEAD. To me, this is the root problem making it hard for projects that live simultaneously in the open and closed worlds.

It would be interesting to see how the Guice team handles it, but maybe they're patch velocity is small.

As for why GWT didn't get a huge external community of committers? I do think it has something to do with the fact that it is a gated community, that people feel like they don't "own" it, Google does. Maybe re-open sourcing it and rebranding it as "Open Web Toolkit" or "Community Web Toolkit" would somewhat remove those mental blocks.

I would love for the open community to be true owners of GWT, and Google as just a contributor. I've been lobbying to make it happen, and I hope it does. Too many external people have put in a lot of work, they deserve it.

I'm with stephen on that. You say each of you working in the GWT team, as a person, didn't have enough time to do review of submissions. To you there was not enough bandwidth.

I say your employer didn't allocate enough bandwidth. It prioritized internal needs so far over the free software approach that the free software aspect died off completely.

You are right in saying none of the developers was an elitist; you are not right in saying that Google in itself wasn't elitist. Your manager's manager's manager knew exactly what he was doing when he allocated this many people to your team, and not more; when he didn't allocate people to do full-time community submission review when there was obviously enough work for multiple such positions.

That's one issue with "sponsored but free" projects: they never are really free because the work gets prioritized that benefits the sponsor, not the work that benefits the project as a whole. Projects are forcibly steered to keep their center of gravity and biggest source of submission inhouse, under the control of the sponsor. It's a very simple strategy of making a "free" project non-free; you can immediately pull the plug on a project which misbehaves: first you make sure the developers not under your control get stalled and discouraged, and that their work becomes harder; they cannot keep up. They couldn't continue the work being done on their own. Then, you make sure the others are so engrossed in work you, the sponsor, assign to them that they cannot keep a project healthy through intellectual exchange with externals. You build a glass wall around the project. You make internal documentation that does not need to be redistributed with your "free software" because it is not a part of it according to the law. The (complicated) build system isn't, either. Finally you have complete control of the direction, progress, and life of the project. You, the sponsor, can submit the project to your neurotic desires, which we, developers, all know. The typical corporate bullshit-o-rama that never fails to make a good project go to hell.

Open source is not a salvation.

The only way to prevent really good projects which have received huge amounts of contribution from skilled developers from becoming useless wastes of talent is to make sure that external requests, contributions, and requirements are taken at face value and are given a chance to be evaluated with the same attention as internal problems. This cannot happen in a corporation where the management performance is counted as a function of successfully resolved projects coming from internal clients. This cannot happen at all if there are internal clients, because "internal client" is a term made exactly with the point of being able to work better with "internal" clients than "external" clients. Sponsored software is not free software unless it is something akin to a donation, where the sponsor is not given creative or otherwise rule over the project.