The meaning of open | Hacker News Reader

The meaning of open

googleblog.blogspot.com

45 pointspavs18 comments

Nice read, but this is a bit shameless:

>In many cases, most notably our search and ads products, opening up the code would not contribute to these goals and would actually hurt users. The search and advertising markets are already highly competitive with very low switching costs, so users and advertisers already have plenty of choice and are not locked in.

Convenient, huh? Open just happens to win except for the part that strategically keeping closed makes Google gazillions of dollars. And claiming search is highly competitive? Google has more than 4 x the market share of their nearest competitor.

His claim that opening their algorithm would expose them to gaming of the system is hard to rebut, however. Search spam is bad enough already.

s/search spam/windows viruses/

Would you make the argument that Windows is more secure because its code is not open?

They're not really analogous. You can get a copy of Windows and poke at it until you figure out exactly how it works. You could even theoretically disassemble the machine code. You can't, however, get your hands on a Google box (or cluster).

Oh, but you can get your hands on a Google GSA box. Not to mention that security by obscurity is most effectively breached through trial and error ... there's nothing stopping you from gaming Google's algorithm right now (and many spammers are doing just that).

I don't know why the parent got downvoted, but the situations are similar. If you can't secure your code while being open about your methods, obscurity won't help in the long term.

It doesn't seem likely that Google GSA uses the same algo as their web search.

Not to mention that security by obscurity is most effectively breached through trial and error

Really? I'm not a security expert, but isn't brute force impractical except in the smallest of search spaces?

there's nothing stopping you from gaming Google's algorithm right now (and many spammers are doing just that)

True, but the situation would probably be even worse if the algorithm were open, wouldn't you say?

If you can't secure your code while being open about your methods, obscurity won't help in the long term.

Also true, but as other people have already commented, this is more like a matter of policy than security. And besides, some methods can be open because they're intrinsically hard to get around, (e.g. crypto algorithms: cos it's math, baby) and others because they're expensive (e.g. I don't know, hardware requiring expensive/rare materials?). However, web search algorithms are horses of another color, aren't they? I hesitate to say for certain, but it's possible that there is no search algorithm that cannot be gamed if it is known. If that is the case, then security by obscurity, while not being an ideal solution, may in fact be the only option.

There are no algorithms in Windows that can be easily gamed if the source was available. This is not about security either. Nice straw man though.

The primary issue here is not security, it's closer to a policy problem like the one the Federal Reserve faces in trying to fight inflation and promote economic growth at the same time.

There is much to admire here, and his admittedly grandiose words about the open being the future of government, commerce, entertainment and culture generally sound great to the optimist in all of us. I have a few minor quibbles with conflating their Android efforts with everything else, but in general this is an admirable policy eloquent expressed and stoutly defended.

I think the most important part is this: "All other things being equal, a 10 percent increase in share or a 10 percent increase in industry value should lead to the same outcome. ... As long as we contribute a steady stream of great products we will prosper along with the entire ecosystem. We may get a smaller piece, but it will come from a bigger pie."

I wish more companies had the courage to take this position, but it's so much easier to accept a guaranteed slice of a known pie.

Using Android as an example of an 'Open' system and giving control to the users is fairly disingenuous. Parts and chunks are 'open', with huge, critical chunks being walled off for Google and OHA member eyes only.

The most interesting part for me:

"So if you are trying to grow an entire industry as broadly as possible, open systems trump closed. And that is exactly what we are trying to do with the Internet. Our commitment to open systems is not altruistic. Rather it's good business, since an open Internet creates a steady stream of innovations that attracts users and usage and grows the entire industry."

somewhat off-topic: if your weblog hosts content from multiple authors, put the author's name at the top of the post. reading "I" and not knowing who "I" is is confusing and having to scroll to the bottom to find out and then back up again is annoying.

"Posted by Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management" is the second line after the title.

No its not. Its actually the last line of the post.

I only see it at the end of the entire post . . .

Hum. Somehow, I got redirected to:

http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/12/meaning-of-op...

Which is the same post, on a different Google blog, with a different layout.

It would be really awesome if google were to open source mapreduce, chubby, and bigtable -- these are tools that would allow innovation at greater scale, and it's not clear that any open tools are of the same quality.

An application for which you have no source or distributable code and can only use through a dumb terminal while it runs on somebody else's computer is about as far from "open" as you can get.

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