> How is Google stopping funding a OSS project any worse than Google never funding it in the first place?
Think this through. Let's say they spin up a team to work with me on it (which honestly is the only point of giving them Vale at all). Then suddenly, they shut down the entire team and harvest the headcount for some other project. That's devastating, projects don't survive that kind of sudden exodus. I could quit and work on it solo, but then I'm one person trying to pick up the pieces and work through the technical debt and missing knowledge of an entire team. It would take _years_ to recover from that.
The alternative is to keep it open-source, work with volunteers, and eventually do what Zig did: make an open-source-centric 501(c)(3) and hire people to help.
What you say makes sense if I just want to keep this a side-project. This isn't a side project, it's my life's work at this point.
I can't imagine that there would be a reason to close it to work on it at Google. That would be a very unusual situation.
> This isn't just a side project for me.
Then you probably made the right decision to work on it full time, but only as an alternative to working on it part time. If Google would have paid you to work on it full time, there really isn't any risk. If they ever tell you to work on something else, you can still quit.
1. Make next version propietary, or particially propietary
2. Keep updating the closed version, no more core team for open version
3. After some time the open version is too oudated, too far behind the propietary version
4. Ambiquity on lisencing also deteriorates intrest
For examples see, Qt, MySql, Java
So, android being an open source project, how does one turn off these nefarious repeated connectivity checks (phoning home)?
Or how does one modify `/etc/hosts` like we do on Linux?
Why do we have to go all the way to root the device or use a different OS to achieve these?
- https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...
Developer tools are different.
Also the source code link I provided was to vanilla Android, not to a commercial version running on someone's phone.
This is just not how things happen. At all.
There's a lot of fear in our post about things that _could_ happen, but haven't actually happened in Google's history, or aren't unique to corporate sponsorship.
> 1. I wouldn't be able to refuse if they told me to add tracking, analytics, AI "learning", or lock-in mechanisms.
Google just doesn't do this with OSS projects. I've never seen on mine, or heard about it in others, or heard news of problems. I did work near a CLI that sent some usage analytics back (so they could see crash reports, etc) and some people complained, and it was removed. It was never nefarious and the idea that Google is trying to make better ad profiles or somesuch via OSS projects is frankly ludicrous.
> 2. If at any point they thought that Vale competed with Golang, they would shut it down. It doesn't matter that they're completely different (Vale doesn't even have a GC); if any person in the chain of command even had the _perception_ that it did, Vale would die. > 3. If at any point they wanted the headcount for other things, they would shut it down.
How is Google stopping funding a OSS project any worse than Google never funding it in the first place? They can't "shut down" the project any more after paying you to work on it than before paying you to work on it. If you want to work on it for free, just do so.
Yes, you _might_ have to fork the official repo if it got moved to under Google's GitHub orgs, but contrary to your fears, Google has a good track record of handing off OSS projects they don't want to maintain. There's a whole OSS office to help with this and an official process for transferring ownership and copyrights.
You're also allowed to work on non-Google OSS projects for 20% if it fits in the spirit and goals of 20% time, so if Vale is even vaguely in-line with Google work and goals, you could have just... worked on it. Did you actually talk to anyone at Google about this?