Google Keeps Close Eye on Open Source
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Q&A: Chris DiBona, a programs manager for Google, talks about how the company uses open-source software and what it contributes to the open-source community.
Click here to read more about Googles "Summer of Code" project.
But the most recent draft of GPL Version 3 has actually dropped that provision, so it makes it very easy for us to say its likely that well welcome GPL Version 3 software into the company—even for things that may end up in production. Whereas before, if people opt to have that kind of restriction on [open-source software], we just couldnt use it in production and expose it to the end user.
It was sort of a thing that was like whatever they work on is fine with us, because were very good at managing incoming code into the company. So it was never really a problem. The latest revision [of GPLv3] is actually pretty good.
Do you have any thoughts on Microsofts recent claim that free and open-source software violates a large number of Microsoft patents?
Yeah, we saw that, and like most of the world wed like to see them actually enumerate what [those patents] are. Its more of a wait and see. Its easy to say things like that, its another thing to se what concrete actions come of it.
But if there is real meat to it then places like Google would have to be concerned, Id say…
You know, like I said, I dont know. Theres just not enough information for us to know right now.
Does Suns open-sourcing of Java have an impact on the way Google views Java as a development platform?
It doesnt change how were looking at it, but it does increase the utility of Java for us. So before they had released Java as GPL, we had signed a source code agreement with them where we could give them patches and bugs and all this other stuff—because we have a lot of fairly advanced Java development going on at the company. We have folks like Joshua Bloch working for us and hes a very prominent Java developer and hes involved in the Java Community Process very heavily.
So we always had a way of getting patches in and some features developed. So that was fine for us. But with it being open source, its actually better for us in a lot of ways, because we can access certain parts of the code in ways we couldnt before. And we can fix them and offer those fixes up without as much ceremony around submitting those patches and features. We can say, OK, its an open-source project so we can just release this stuff. Thats incredibly freeing for us. So we were very happy to see them go GPL there.
Do you, or have you done something like a Black Duck or Palamida assessment of your code?
No, and the reason why is we practice extremely tight control on how code comes into the company. And were very, very good at training our engineers. So, to give you an idea, I can look at any end binary in the company and I can tell you what open-source software is expressed within that—because of the way that we manage our code base.
So while those kinds of tools are interesting during an acquisition process—and we generally do not talk about our practices around acquisitions—theyre not as interesting to us internally. Also, I think that expanding the utility of that code would be useful. Right now Im not sure how incredibly useful that would be for us to run internally. They are good, quality projects, though.
Well, since you said you have a bunch of proprietary code running on top of a stack that consists of lots of open-source components, I was wondering how you could discern what was in there.
Its worth pointing out that its much like if youre running an application on top of Linux. Its the same way we sort of run our Web servers, our Web applications. And then we have Linux as a kernel and as an operating system underneath it.
The way we actually bring code into the company when were using an open-source library is extremely controlled. And the thing is, internally, Google as a company has always had a lot of discipline about how we bring code into the company.
Specifically, when you create a piece of code and you submit it, another Googler has to do a code review of your code before it ever gets into the code repository. And if somebody suddenly showed up and submitted 25,000 lines of code, well that would be questionable. And we have ways of dealing with that that are really very efficient. We tell people you want that to be inside this one directory, you want to tag it in a very specific way so that we can track it… So were actually quite facile at managing incoming code.
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