Google has been a great ally to the open source movement.
Google has helped Linux scale. Google has broken through the age-old question of “desktop Linux” with Android, a Linux distro, and the coming Honeycomb. Google has contributed immense quantities of code to the Apache Foundation, and given to other projects as well.
But Google is not open source's daddy. And it's a mistake for open source advocates to see Google as anything but what it is, which is a corporate entity seeking profits.
I wrote here recently that Google has finally learned the Little Red Hen lesson with Android and decided it must control the operating environment with Honeycomb to deliver consumers a uniform experience.
I applauded the move. Among followers of open source I was pretty much alone in that.
As I expected, some analysts are calling this a betrayal of open source, arguing that going downstream with a uniform Android code base is somehow evil. It's not. It's necessary if the word Android is going to mean anything in the market, and if the amount of manufacturer and carrier “crapware” on the platform is to be limited.
At the same time, Google's Chris DiBona has offered another lame set of excuses as to why Google rejects the Affero GPL. He claimed it was about “engineering time.”
This is even more laughable than letting Virginia Commonwealth's basketball team into the NCAA tournament. Yes, I know they're in the Final Four – that's the point here. Self-interest.
Google uses open source in order to benefit its business. It doesn't let the “principles” of open source get in the way of that business. Google's business is to be the low-cost provider of Internet stuff – connectivity, files, answers. Its secret sauce is in its online systems, and no it's not going to share them because of some principle.
I can respect that. Every company must follow self-interest first.
Which is why open source, as a movement, can't make itself dependent on any corporate model. And why every open source user has to keep corporate interests at arms-length.
What Oracle's purchase of Sun did, what it was intended to do, was to break this idea that being a corporate sponsor was the same thing as following a principle. It's called free enterprise because we're all free to serve our own self-interest, and so it must be with open source.
Open source is a set of principles. It can be used as a business model, as a development model, as a way to make money, but it is first and foremost a set of principles, principles that work. Sharing the enormous cost of hand-making this essential good of software – and it is still mostly hand-made – is essential to making the competitive market in technology work.
It's fine when one company builds a railroad, but we know from history that even if government aid is essential to that endeavor, it's still the company's railroad, and they will use every effort to exploit that advantage for private gain. How much better it is to have shared infrastructure, a highway system, to which every business has access, so every business can compete.
Sharing the costs of essential infrastructure is what open source is all about. Google shares more of those costs than any other company I know of. But expecting Google, as a private entity, to be open source's daddy is expecting too much.
