The-Source.com

Adam Williamson has a good series of “controversial crap” over on his blog, mainly discussing things related to the recent Red Hat/Canonical kerfuffle (but there are some other interesting bits as well).

In his clarification post, this bit caught my attention:

The reason I don’t complain much about Microsoft or Apple or Google is that I pretty much consider them lost causes. They exist to make a buck, and they have cultures that are more or less fundamentally at odds with proper collaborative F/OSS development. Even with Google, Android is pretty much a manual on how not to run a proper F/OSS project, and their ultimate goal appears to be to own every piece of information about everyone in the world, which frankly creeps me the hell out. I don’t expect anything more than minimal legal compliance with open source licenses from Google and Apple and Microsoft, and most other software companies. Whenever we see anything else I get pleasantly surprised. I get passionate about Canonical precisely *because* they’re not as bad as those companies – they’re definitely not a lost cause, they do a lot of good stuff, and they have a great opportunity to do even more really good and constructive work.

Grouping groups

Although I think I agree with much of what Mr. Williamson has to say, I question if Google should be grouped in with Microsoft and Apple as “lost causes”.

On Google

Serious question here: what exactly has Google done that is detrimental to Free Software or Open Source? Google wasn’t even founded as an “Open Source company”, yet it makes a lot of contributions to FLOSS (albeit more so on the Open Source side than the Free Software side).

I’ll confess freely I don’t follow news about Google very closely – one reason being I don’t have Google classified mentally as a “threat”. I don’t really have them classified at the same level as Red Hat, but they are nowhere near Microsoft or Apple (or Novell, for that matter) in terms of offensiveness and harm wreaked on the FLOSS ecosystem.

In the context of corporations “friendly” to FLOSS, I would put Google somewhere between Canonical and IBM, with a slight edge to Google because of GSOC and Google’s clean approach to patents.

I’m not aware of Google trying to subvert the meaning of “Open Source” or waging a war of FUD, ala Microsoft. I’m not aware of Google trying to absolutely control users and developers, ala Apple. And I’m not aware of Google playing cat’s-paw to such companies, ala Novell.

My Rankings

Again, in the context of corporations, I would rank some commonly mentioned entities as follows:

1. Red Hat
2. Mandriva
3. Canonical
4. Google
5. IBM
6. Oracle
7. Apple  (Below here is active harm)
8. Novell
9. Microsoft

Apple barely escapes being “actively harmful” because they have an “enemy of my enemy” thing going on that incidentally helps open standards a bit, and Open Source a (very) little. I don’t think Apple is intentionally trying to promote any real sort of Open-ness or Freedom, and I wouldn’t argue too hard if someone wanted to move the “active harm” cutoff a little higher.

Your rankings?

I’d be interested in hearing other thoughts on how you view and mentally rank some of these companies (or ones I left out) – and I’d be especially interested in any references to anti-Free Software activity by Google.

Have I really been overlooking a major threat from Google? Or perhaps, is the “Google is the next Microsoft”-meme being messaged by Microsoft apologists?