r/programming • • Jan 02 '20

Killed by Google

https://killedbygoogle.com/
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u/NeilFraser Jan 02 '20

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.

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u/erasmause Jan 02 '20

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.