My article wasn’t about whether Google is good or bad – you seem to have completely missed the point. Afterall, I’m a Microsoft employee, and I’m using Blogger instead of Live Spaces. This isn’t an intercompany war. Don’t mistake it for one.

This was directed at the FSF. I pointed to their definition of “freedom” – link in the article:
1. The ability to study the code
2. The ability to modify the code
3. The ability to distribute the code
(and whatever else they have added on lately).

It doesn’t make software any more “free” to publish how it works or internal designs. This question was about “definition of Freedom”.

Oracle works on Linux and it’s not FOSS and it lives along with tons and tons of Linux companies at many many events.

This article wasn’t about in some way promoting Microsoft or demoting Google. It was about what the FSF’s stand is on a remote-desktop’d OS which is purely 100% GPLv3′d but you never get to do any of the four things specified in their “definition of Freedom”.

What I think is, its not just the code which is all important. The way google works is, which is quite different from MS, they publish their internal architecture designs and stuff.
heard of Mapreduce, Bigtable, Sawzall, GFS, etc etc ?

http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html
http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html
http://labs.google.com/papers/gfs.html

and others

They publish it openly, they aren’t worried about someone stealing their brainchild, say Mapreduce. And its happening, they know it, Yahoo is using same mapreduce thing, called Hadoop http://hadoop.apache.org/core/

They are using something similar to bigtable, even they have language like sawzall called pig.

This is the kind of stuff MS would never do. They just provide packaged, canned, cooked software.

Thats a big difference in google and MS philosophy of work. People know it, appreciate it.

Knowledge isnt just code, or some tarball. So I think google is giving its share to opensource community.

If if you want code, yeah they provide code in some cases too
http://code.google.com/p/google-perftools/

You can learn a lot from the malloc implementation.

Google is not redhat or va linux, it has to maintain its business side and its generous side, which its doing perfectly, it has to give away its ideas for free and at the same time fight with closed source, glutton like MS. Its quite difficult job.

I can write about this on and on, but I have to get back to work…