Google, lock-in, and evil
The last week of news surrounding Google doesn't paint a picture of a lovey-dovey company that just wants to help you search. The backdrop for all of the news is the emergence of "cloud platforms" upon which developers can build. It used to be that developers would write for Windows or Linux: Now they're writing applications to run in the cloud of their choice (Google, Bungee Labs, Salesforce, or open-source Coghead)
The problem with this approach, as Tim O'Reilly points out with reference to Google, is it paves the way to lock-in that the "offline" world could only dream of inflicting:
I've been warning for some time that the first phase of Web 2.0 is the acquisition of critical mass via network effects, but that once companies achieve that critical mass, they will be tempted to consolidate their position, leading ultimately to a replay of the personal computer industry's sad decline from an open, energetic marketplace to a controlled economy.
Enter Google's soft disavowal of its "Don't do evil" motto. As Techcrunch suggests, Google likely doesn't like being held to this (somewhat subjective) standard anymore, now that not doing evil becomes ever more difficult at its size and scale.
So what is Google to do? How can Google preserve the impressive heft of its momentum without strangling its potential supporters?
For me, the answer is simple: Put Google's actions beyond scrutiny by making them subject to open API, open source, and open data pledges.
Open source, for example, doesn't look into motives. Motives are immaterial; license is all. If I abide by the GPL I am absolutely guaranteed certain freedoms - the copyright holder simply can't take them away from me, no matter how much she may try.
Google has pledged to open data in the past. It should formalize that pledge and challenge its competitors to follow suit.
Google has also been a supporter of open source through source-code contributions, Summer of Code, etc. There's still plenty of room to shore up that support, however, by proactively abiding by the terms of open-source licenses which may not require open source according to old definitions of "distribution," but which certainly imply it according to the spirit of these open-source licenses. In tandem, Google should stop fighting licenses like the AGPL.
Google is not an evil company. It is, however, at an inflection point where its size will make it both prone to "evil" and the appearance of evil (according to interested onlookers) on a regular basis. To avoid becoming like Microsoft - admired but mistrusted - Google should formally pledge to openness.
Such a pledge won't hurt Google's business. If anything, it will do the opposite.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
They profit off of privacy and copyright violations. If that is not evil, than what is?
But they _are_ a public company so the choice not to be evil isn't entirely up to them anymore. I agree that it would be great to see them embrace OSS more. It's conceivable that there will be open source implementations of Bigtable and people will reverse-engineer the App Engine framework so that applications created for App Engine can be extracted and moved elsewhere. It's not entirely unfeasible that someone could write an abstraction for Bigtable ontop of something like CouchDB and have the ability to virtualize the app and host it anywhere. Of course the real lock-in comes with being able to access google accounts- there's no substitute for that and it's certainly a luring jar of honey that will attract many developers. But again, I would imagine it possible to write an intermediate authentication layer that abstracts things so google accounts can be plugged into it, yet the apps written aren't directly coupled to Google.
We released a Google App Engine JumpBox on Friday to make it easier for anyone to tinker with it. for anyone who is interested, it's freely available here:
http://www.jumpbox.com/open/gappengine
Sean
- by ronaldgabria June 18, 2009 11:34 PM PDT
- I think google become evil. Here is what happened to me few days ago http://adwordsevil.wordpress.com/
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