On Wednesday 10 March 2010 01:34 pm, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > Google hasn't just released the Go programming language as free, open > source software out of charity,
If Google were primarily known for Go, you might have a point, but Google has the specific policy of encouraging their employees to work on passion projects 20% of the time (google for google 80/20), some of which end up as free software. Google also develops other software for internal use, some of which (like Go) it releases as free software, while most of its "consumer-oriented" software and virtually all of its web services -- its bread and butter -- are proprietary code. The web services, and specifically the advertising from those services which wouldn't be viable if the web services were free software (as in Affero GPL) and easily recreated by other people with big servers, are what generate the revenue that pay for the 80/20 program and research projects like Go. In other words, it's like a textbook example of what Joe was describing, not a Red Hat situation where the company was started purely to provide support and packaging for an otherwise free product. Rob _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
