Hacker News Reader

Comment by Boulth | Hacker News Reader

I think this stems from their internal monorepo culture, e.g. they care about building everything in one go, not in isolation. This can also explain the issues with golang dependencies, it's hard for them to see problems of most regular developers as they use a unique toolchain (custom SCM, custom build tools etc.)

View on HN

Not Invented Here (tm) seems like a large part of the cultural problem with being better open source contributors.

It's great they open source a lot of their stuff, but just because you're big enough as a company to rewrite {component of build chain} for yourselves... doesn't mean you should.

Caveat: I know parts of Google are awesome with contributions and using standards.

Biggest problem I think is googlers can't use code if it's licensed under AGPL.

edit: GPL -> AGPL

Not true. Ex-googler.

The license we (I am an engineer at Google) cannot use is the AGPL.

Well of course. The popularity of web-based SaaS is in no small part due to the fact that having AGPL dependencies is a much more avoidable situation than having GPL dependencies. (cf LLVM) If only the AGPL had been invented along with the GPL, we wouldn't have this problem.

Not invented here? Seems like the exact opposite at Google and it surprises me all the time.

Purchased a Google WiFi for example and the license agreement is pages long of using open source software.

https://support.google.com/wifi/answer/7359345?hl=en

Google uses the Linux kernel for everything. From Google Home to Chromecast to their cloud and Android and ChromeOS.

Only now working on their own kernel, Zircon but suspect just experimentation.

Google tends to use off the shelve if something exist to use. They tend to focus on new things.

Another great example is using Intel processors but did the TPUs as nothing available to meet their needs.

Then we get speech to text using a NN at 16k samples a second at a reasonable cost.

From my experience: they fork every lib and they don't contribute back. Just look at the list of libs that are built into Chrome.

Well if does not fit their needs makes sense to fork. But Google has the money to have an attitude to re-create the wheel and that does not appear their approach.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com