Q&A: Google’s Open-Source Balancing Act

“What’s the view of open source within
Google?
I asked myself, ‘Who am I trying to address?’ The world of
open-source business? No. The world of the open-source enthusiast?
No. I’m really looking to work with open-source developers. We came
up with these goals for our group: to support open-source
development in general, which means to support open-source
infrastructure; support the release of open-source code, from
Google and in general; and to create more open-source developers,
because especially when I started, there was a perception that
Google took a lot of people from the open-source world and then
went away. It was partly true, because people would come here and
say, ‘Wow, I’ve been working on my open-source project forever, and
I want a new problem,’ and we have a very good class of new
problem. So they kind of went away…”

Complete
Story