None of these companies open source everything, or even the most valuable parts.

Picking on Google here, their most valuable part by far is injecting ads into search. Most agree their search is nothing special, getting worse even. We've seen tens of companies write good enough search engines. You could write one 10x better tomorrow and still likely fail. Their code is not the secret sauce - their user lock in is.

A lot of the same could be said for FB.

If google’s search is nothing special, why are all other search engines worse, including yours?

I agree with you but at the same time I can see why you were downvoted. No need to be so rude.

But I feel that it's incorrect to dismiss Google as being a bad search engine. DDG and Brave both provide !bangs for google and many other search engines that a significant part of their userbase use regularly. I myself use google often when I'm searching for something extremely specific, something that Google may give me 2-3 relevant search results for. Other search engines would often not give me anything relevant at all.

At least a few search engines are either equally good or better. Kagi immediately comes to mind, but there have been others posted on HN over the years as well

A big part is that they have access to an enormous amount of click data and user data. This not only from being the dominant search engine, but also from sources like Chrome.

This post has nothing to do with my comment or the broader discussion.

Can you tell me where I can see the source code for the Google maps APIs please?

"a ton of" does not imply "all".

Isn't that exactly his point? They open source "a ton of work", but not everything; thereby "not competing on code alone". The code of, say, Android or Google Web Toolkit is open source, but the products they build on top (App Store, Gmail/Maps/...) is closed. It only makes sense to open source the parts on which you're not competing.

Uber open sourcing a bunch of periphery services while having benefited from a huge amount of existing open source libraries to build said service is not even slightly the same thing.

There is absolutely nothing here about open sourcing the bits of code that make them the real money. The business logic implementations, that's what I'd be interested in seeing. That's what we're talking about.

Most of these companies open source because they're great strategies for recruitment anyway. Ie, they get something out of open sourcing these periphery services.