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A comment on Who Does That Server Really Serve?. Parent comment

Re:Who Does That Server Really Serve? by fitshipit on Friday December 26, 2014 @12:29PM (#8799415)
Red Hat? Or what about Facebook or Google -- open source is pretty central to their business model.
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Re:Who Does That Server Really Serve? by dubcanada on Friday December 26, 2014 @12:42PM (#8799452)
Facebook and Google don't care about open source... Their desire is to get people to use their search/system. That's all they care about, regardless of what pretty bow they wrap it up in.

Let's look at Google...

Android - Get people to use Google products on mobile. Adsense - Add ads to your site. Analytics - Track how users use stuff to provide better ads. Gmail - Track your email to serve you better ads. Google Search - Serve you ads.

Sure they have Dart, Angular, etc which they developed for use internally and then released to the public. But do you honestly think that has anything to do with their business model? They hired smart people, and smart people design things. Those people then released them as open source. But do you honestly believe if Google was to start (theoretically) having money issues, those products would not be the first to go?

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Re:Who Does That Server Really Serve? by xorcist on Friday December 26, 2014 @01:31PM (#8799615)
It everything to do with their business model. Joel Spolsky called it commoditizing your complement (google it).
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Re:Who Does That Server Really Serve? by GeneralMayhem on Friday December 26, 2014 @12:51PM (#8799478)
I'd expect some of the bigger R&D moonshots to go first - Loon, Wing, etc. The open source contributions are good PR with the software development community.
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Re:Who Does That Server Really Serve? by JDShu on Friday December 26, 2014 @01:02PM (#8799517)
Red Hat, by the way, deliberately obscured their kernel code in order to stop Oracle from simply providing support for Red Hat code. Probably the correct business move, but also probably against the spirit of FOSS.

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Controversy-surrounds...

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Re:Who Does That Server Really Serve? by teleclimber on Friday December 26, 2014 @12:47PM (#8799471)
Google? Facebook? Are you kidding? These companies have lots of great open source projects. But the core of their business is certainly not open.

Try to find Goog's SERP ranking algorithm on GitHub. Or their Adwords scoring/pricing code. What about Google Doc's text editor? Also, most Google apps on Android are closed.

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Re:Who Does That Server Really Serve? by paulhauggis on Friday December 26, 2014 @01:05PM (#8799525)
Two companies that take from the community to save money and then don't give back anything even remotely related to their business model.
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Re:Who Does That Server Really Serve? by jacquesm on Friday December 26, 2014 @01:22PM (#8799576)
> don't give back anything even remotely related to their business model.

Why should they? It would be nice if they did but they'd be directly enabling their competition. That's not what open source is all about as far as I understand it.

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Re:Who Does That Server Really Serve? by fidotron on Friday December 26, 2014 @01:28PM (#8799600)
Indeed. The "Open Source" aspects of those companies are more to do with trying to diminish the value of their competitors.

It's a case of "Everything I do is valuable, but everything you do should be free."

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