A New Home for Google Open Source
Originally on Google Open Source Blog
Posted by Will Norris, Open Source Programs Office
Free and open source software has been part of our technical and organizational
foundation since Google's early beginnings. From servers running the Linux
kernel to an internal culture of being able to patch any other team's code, open
source is part of everything we do. In return, we've released millions of lines
of open source code, run programs like
Google Summer of Code and
Google
Code-in, and sponsor open
source projects and communities through organizations like
Software Freedom Conservancy, the
Apache Software Foundation, and
many others.
Today, we're launching
opensource.google.com, a new website
for Google Open Source that ties together all of our initiatives with
information on how we use, release, and support open source.
This new site showcases the breadth and depth of our love for open source. It
will contain the expected things: our programs, organizations we support, and a
comprehensive list of open source projects we've released. But it also contains
something unexpected: a look under the hood at how we "do" open source.
Helping you find interesting open source
One of the tenets of our philosophy towards releasing open source code is that
"more is better." We don't know which projects will find an audience, so we help
teams release code whenever possible. As a result, we have released thousands of
projects under open source licenses ranging from larger products like
TensorFlow,
Go, and
Kubernetes to
smaller projects such as
Light My Piano,
Neuroglancer
and
Periph.io. Some
are fully supported while others are experimental or just for fun. With so many
projects spread across 100 GitHub organizations and our self-hosted Git service,
it can be difficult to see the scope and scale of our open source footprint.
To provide a more complete picture, we are launching a
directory of our open source
projects which we will expand over time. For many of these projects we are
also adding information about how they are used inside Google. In the future, we
hope to add more information about project lifecycle and maturity.
How we do open source
Open source is about more than just code; it's also about community and process.
Participating in open source projects and communities as a large corporation
comes with its own unique set of challenges. In 2014, we helped form the
TODO Group, which provides a forum to
collaborate and share best practices among companies that are deeply committed
to open source. Inspired by many discussions we've had over the years, today we
are publishing our internal documentation for
how we do open source at Google.
These docs explain the
process
we follow for
releasing new open source projects,
submitting patches to
others' projects, and how we
manage the open source
code that we bring into the company and use ourselves. But in addition to
the
how, it outlines
why we do things the way we do,
such as
why we only use code
under certain licenses or
why we require contributor
license agreements for all patches we receive.
Our policies and procedures are informed by many years of experience and lessons
we've learned along the way. We know that our particular approach to open source
might not be right for everyone—there's more than one way to do open source—and
so these docs should not be read as a "how-to" guide. Similar to how it can be
valuable to read another engineer's source code to see how they solved a
problem, we hope that others find value in seeing how we approach and think
about open source at Google.
To hear a little more about the backstory of the new Google Open Source site, we
invite you to listen to the
latest
episode from our friends at The Changelog. We hope you enjoy exploring the
new site!
