Does anyone even try to sell closed-source software anymore? It must be hard, when so many of the tools used to power the world’s largest datacenters and build the likes of Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn have been planted on GitHub for everyone to use. Even Google’s magic sauce, the software that knows what you will read or buy before you read or buy it, is now freely available to any ambitious developer with dreams of a smarter application.
Google didn’t used to share its source code with the rest of us. It used to share research papers, then leave it to others to come up with the code. Perhaps Google regrets letting Yahoo steal its thunder with Hadoop. Whatever the reason, Google is clearly in the thick of open source now, having launched its own projects — TensorFlow and Kubernetes — that are taking the world by storm.
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