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0 pointsmike_hearn1y ago0 comments

> Companies like Google have many millions of lines of code in proprietary in house code. But they depend on an even larger amount of code in OSS form.

I don't think this is actually true:

1. The Google codebase is on the order of billions of lines of code, not millions.

2. It's basically all written in house, from the threading libraries and core standard libraries up. The parts that are open source (e.g. Linux, OpenJDK) are very small compared to the code they've written themselves.

ChromeOS and Android are open source, but they aren't even close to being the bulk of their codebase.

If Linux had never existed they'd have found some alternative, probably either a bulk licensing deal with a proprietary UNIX vendor or they'd have used Windows as the closest cheap Intel based alternative. Then they'd have put funding into developing their own in-house serving OS a lot earlier.

Source: I worked there.

> Chrome is open source because webkit was open source because Apple forked KHTML from the KDE project.

Chrome is open source for strategic reasons and because the executives in charge wanted it to be. There's no particular reason it has to be open. Safari and Edge aren't.

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jillesvangurp1y ago

Webkit still is open source. Apple never owned the full copyright to it and they would have to do a complete rewrite to get out of that license, which is GPL and always has been. Safari is indeed closed source. But it uses webkit. For the same reason, Google is stuck with the same license and copyright situation. Whether they like it or not, webkit/kml/chromium are forever GPL. Nothing short of a complete rewrite can fix that.

I think you are grossly underestimating how dependent both companies are on various open source projects. It's definitely true that they also do a lot of in house code of course; and they also contribute a lot of their own projects. And of course especially Google is a repeat offender when it comes to creating a lot of dead projects, reinventing the wheel, etc. It looks like their attempt to create their own operating system kernel is slowly dying now. Fuchsia is all but dead at this point. So they are back to Linux being their only future. There's the whole Kotlin ecosystem, which they helped create, which is starting to compete with flutter. And so on.

mike_hearnOP1y ago

WebKit isn't GPL, it's LGPL, which is why Safari is closed source.

I'm not really underestimating anything. I worked on the Google codebase for years. It has very little dependence on open source code relative to its overall size.

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