Google embraces, extends, and extinguishes
Hey, I was just talking about this in a comment the other day! I totally agree with the author here. I was surprised not to see any mention of cloud facing open source products. Kubernetes seems like a prime example. Google lost its containerization first mover advantage to Docker (remember google was famous early for its internal use of containers). So they targeted the next level up the stack of container orchestration. Kubernetes is a great project, but its clear priority is compatibility with the cloud computing business model. It didn’t take long for google to offer GKE on top of kubernetes. At least for now, there is feature parity between open source and hosted versions. But I don’t expect that to last long. I would be wary of the kubernetes project introducing features that only work well in google’s cloud.<p>The main externality of this open source EEE strategy is developer opportunity cost. When google swept into the chat market, they used their size and first mover advantage to push an open standard, XMPP. So developers who might have worked on other projects&#x2F;standards naturally gravitated toward XMPP and contributed their time there. If those developers had known the future of XMPP, they likely would not have worked on it. They could have invested time in a competing, more open project instead.<p>This to me is the real danger. It’s bad enough that google gets to benefit from thousands of free contributors to its “open source” code. It’s even worse that they are taking those developers away from other projects, so that when google moves to the third phase of EEE, there are no viable alternatives.