Question: What is Google's track record for where their open source releases end up over time?

Genuinely not knowledgeable here

blazarquasar 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It depends on where they decide to go with it, I guess. Kubernetes, Go, Tensorflow, Chromium, gRPC are some examples that obviously went incredibly well.

	▲	schainks an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Don't forget `cgroups`, eh? That was a huge Linux contribution. or Android Open Source Project?
	▲	accidc 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Or if it becomes commercially valuable, then you can expect Google to take a third direction (embrace, extend, extinguish) : a la their current approach with android
	▲	calebkaiser 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yeah I'm actually less hesitant to try out Google open source projects than I am new Google products. I have no idea if this is accurate or just my impression, but I feel like I've been burned by the "killed by Google" meme almost exclusively on their software products, whereas there are plenty of open source efforts from Google that I think of as stable. In addition to the ones you listed, I'd add the V8 runtime, Jax, Protobuf. Even some of their projects that wound up declining in market share (Angular, Tensorflow--both losing share to projects that wound up at Meta, ironically) are still actively maintained and pushed. But I'm sure there's also a huge graveyard of open source projects they abandoned that just never hit my radar. Still, at least with their open source stuff, you can fork in the worst case.

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AlexErrant 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well, they're not above forking their own project to patch security holes and never upstreaming the fixes.

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117282080803799576

> Google should not be gatekeeping security patches to the standard Android platform code from Android OEMs but that's what they've started doing.

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joemazerino 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Maintain it briefly then slowly let it die.

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neuronexmachina 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A recent example was the Google workspace CLI, which was maintained for just a month: https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli

	▲	Mond_ 8 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		My understanding is that this one was never really "official", and that the guy who released it wasn't following standard procedures. That's not even the official Google github account.
	▲	verdverm 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		yet they "maintain" the pinned state on the org page https://github.com/googleworkspace

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hustwindmaple 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

more like create a big launch for promo, then maintain it briefly then slowly let it die

	▲	jandrese 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's not fair. Sometimes they kill it off quickly. https://killedbygoogle.com/