You have a good point. By open sourcing TensorFlow, Google will benefit from innovations contributed by the community at large.<p>Machine learning frameworks are now commodity software. I give my point about this in a blog post titled &quot;TensorFlow is commodity software&quot; <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.eriksen.com.br&#x2F;en&#x2F;tensorflow-commodity-software" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.eriksen.com.br&#x2F;en&#x2F;tensorflow-commodity-software</a> (HN link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10574444" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10574444</a>)<p>You last phrase is right too: Google built a massive infrastructure because it had Google File System, BigTable and MapReduce. Hadoop, inspired by the published papers, turned into a more sophisticated software (an ex-Google engineer said that, but other Googlers denying his claims) and grown into a big ecosystem of products and services. But while Hadoop was matching the feature set of Google&#x27;s proprietary implementations, Google was getting even bigger.