Google is perhaps the world's largest open-source company. That does not, however, make it the most open. Not even if Google says it's so.
The company is fond of believing itself different. And perhaps it is. For all of its stumbles over privacy concerns, it's still the company that insists it will "not be evil." I give its executives the benefit of the doubt that it really does want to be open, as revealed in a blog published Monday by Senior Vice President Jonathan Rosenberg.
But the irony of Google's position is that it's very open...until it needs to make a buck. Or a billion of them. At that point it's just as closed as its competitors. Perhaps more so.
Rosenberg doesn't shy away from the inconsistency, arguing that Google is closed when it's for its customers' own good:
Am I the only one that just had Napoleon of "Animal Farm" flash through their minds while reading that statement? Some animals are more equal than others, and some companies know better than others when to keep code closed.
It's not that Rosenberg is wrong. It's just that his embarrassment at admitting Google likes the revenue that results from closed systems ties his arguments up in knots, as Gartner's Brian Prentice highlights:
Prentice adds further color:
From Red Hat to Facebook, from Google to Microsoft, from MySQL to Oracle, the same lesson applies: openness is exceptional for creating developer interest, lead generation, and many other things, but some element of proprietary still pays the bills. The big ones, anyway.
No exceptions.
Google is a fantastic company that groks the strategic benefits of openness better than most, and certainly better than its lumbering counterpart in Redmond.
But it's not exceptional in understanding open on-ramps and closed exits. Other important businesses like IBM have been leveraging such principles for years (even before Hewlett-Packard's Martin Fink explained the strategy in "The Business and Economics of Linux and Open Source").
Google isn't original with the business strategy. It's just better at it than most. It's open...until closed takes over to pay the bills.
