>So any repositories that don't have public commits enabled are 'not really open'? A ludicrous suggestion.
WTF, have you even read my comment before answering?
I explicitly said that those: "might still be open source but it's not a community or a multi-company project".
And I never said anything about "public commits" being necessary for something being open, if by that you mean anybody to be able commit arbitrarily.
Restricted commit access is perfectly fine. What I said is not "really open" are projects tightly controlled by a company and mainly developed by its paid employees.
Those are not really open EVEN if they have publicly available source code. Nothing "ludicrous" about it.
> If you need to fork or kiss Google's ass to implement changes to it, then it's not really open.
You're right - you can't be sure to get your changes added to the codebase, but that's not to say it's not open. Hey, at least the codebase is there for you to fork and enjoy. It's not totally open (maybe, we don't really know that yet - you're just assuming it won't be) - it's certainly not closed like many others however.
Google forked because of Apple's agenda of ramming everything but the kitchen sink into WebKit, to the detriment of everyone else. By making the boundaries between the various parts of a browser engine -- scripting engine, layout engine, window control -- more explicit, one can more easily experiment with one part without it being a house of cards.
Microsoft has a history of being hostile to the open-source and free-software communities. They release "shared source" code under licenses with onerous terms or encumbered with patents. In the event that an open-source project built on their technology becomes popular, Microsoft attempts to smother it (for example, see their treatment of Mono).
I trust Google about as much as I trust Red Hat, Canonical, or any other company with a history of friendly interaction with the community. While I'm certainly not going to give them my SSH keys, it seems reasonable to take advantage of open-source software that they release.
>I trust Google about as much as I trust Red Hat, Canonical, or any other company with a history of friendly interaction with the community. While I'm certainly not going to give them my SSH keys, it seems reasonable to take advantage of open-source software that they release
Yes, but then again you work for Google too. That alone could be basis for bias.
I certainly don't trust Google as much as Red Hat or Canonical (well, the same as Canonical of late, maybe). Still remember the bait-switchy GAE pricing changes, among other things.
Can't disagree here. Trust is hard to get, easy to lose, and once it's lost.. good luck getting that back.
Of these 3 I only trust RedHat with their intents. And I don't think we're alone. And that doesn't mean RedHat is the greatest company ever, but I do trust them (I'd also probably never work for them, for that matter).
>In the event that an open-source project built on their technology becomes popular, Microsoft attempts to smother it (for example, see their treatment of Mono).
That was in the past -- and probably from some over-jealous layer types at that point in .NETs development.
Since then Microsoft has even been sponsoring Mono/Xamarin events.
Mono was banned from Microsoft's development conference (see http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2005/Sep-06.html), and faced various sorts of legal threats regarding their implementation of .NET libraries not covered by the ECMA standards process (most notably ASP.NET).
Samba benefited from Microsoft's documentation because Microsoft was forced to disclose it by court order.
Since Mono still seems to be going strong and seems to be one of the official platforms for F#, I'm not sure that something that happened seven years ago is necessarily great proof that they're smothering Mono.
It's proof that Microsoft's intentions towards Mono aren't dependable. They can (and have) changed dramatically, whenever Microsoft wants. Exactly how friendly do you think Microsoft will be if Mono stops being .NET's toehold in non-Microsoft mobile OSes?
Ahhh 2005? Com'on. Much has changed at MS these days. Except licensing. Which is a nightmare to figure out. But MS isn't the only company with that shame.
As a counterpoint, Microsoft employees have contributed to libgit and parts of the ASP Web Stack are open-source under the Apache Licence - see http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/license
I trust Google about as much as I trust Red Hat, Canonical, or any other company with a history of friendly interaction with the community
Sorry but I have say, WTF is this? You are employed by Google https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jmillikin . Can you imagine a current employee saying "I don"t trust my [current employer]" and still expect to show up to work again at 8.30am? How much weight should we give to your "trust"?
I would fully expect that a company would have its own agenda. Google's is/was organizing the world's information. It's a bit, um, something, to expect that they don't have an agenda, ne?
Why would you build the tool to organize the world's information on top of a platform designed to serve a single vendor rather than the user and consumer of the technology?
Google are playing a little game here similar to the antics Microsoft got up to in the early '00s.
All it takes is some level of adoption and then a diversion away from this and all the other vendors spend forever playing catch up, forcing market dominance.
How would that work in practice? The source code is open, anyone can pick it up and use it, thus getting any of it's features.
It's not even remotely comparable to the situation where Microsoft was leveraging their desktop market dominance bundling their _proprietary_ webbrowser.
Also in terms of competition we have an entirely different situation these days. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla all have plenty enough resources to continously enhance their browsers and keep the competition going, and of those four, three are providing the layout engines as open source, while two of them also release fully open source browsers (firefox, chromium).
It will be interesting to see how big a hole this makes in webkit's development pace, Google was the largest webkit contributor in 2012, basically twice as much code as the runner up Apple.
Also it will be interesting to see if Opera will stick to Webkit which it recently changed to, or if they will eventually hop aboard the 'Blink' train.
I for one welcome further competition in this field, particularly on the mobile front.
"We're not sharing our stuff anymore as it's costing too much".
A the risk of sounding like a paranoid nutbag, with stuff like NaCl, SPDY, Dart etc, it sounds like Google have their own agenda.