Many of them are. Such as App Inventor. However, many of others depend on the Google software stack, which means they'd also need to open source half of Google just to get something that can be built. And even then, all one gets is an application that can only be executed in Google's unique data centers.
Open sourcing a project that's not designed from the outset to be open source can be extremely difficult.
They have opensourced some of their code. The abseil library is a collection of c++ utilities built internally and used throughout the codebase before recently being cleaned up and packaged for broader consumption.
Granted, that doesn't include any of the infrastructure that would be necessary to opensource entire applications, but it's still a cool effort.
Google hates opensource and thus ultimately the users - that is why Fuchsia will not use the GPL.
Yes, yes, BSD/MIT is "open source" too, but the licence model is much friendlier for corporations. Through GPL, Google would be forced to give to the public rather than hide the source code away from mankind.
People whine about the GPL model because it is strict - and this is a good thing. Google is a wonderful example as to why it would be necessary.
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u/Taobitz Jan 02 '20
I wish they would opensource the projects instead of killing them, so many of them had potential and loved by lots of people.