zlacker

That "incentive" for Google is "80% of our revenue comes from ads".

Google's open source projects are open in name only.

>>troupo+(OP)
> Google's open source projects are open in name only.

The link at the top of the page is pointing to the GitHub repo, where you can see literally over a million contributions from thousands of people working at hundreds of companies: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/commits/main

I've worked on both Chrome and Android (Chromium and AOSP) professionally, and never worked at Google.

>>px43+S1
You and GP both can be right depending on definition used for “open source”.

>>px43+S1
There is the OSS vs FOSS distinction which may have been unwittingly invoked. Certainly there is nothing “free” about Chromium except its price. Google is not about to switch to a fork for Chrome and any changes to Chromium which are not approved by Google are unlikely to be in any release builds.

>>px43+S1
Well, true :)

What I should've written is that: yes, they are open source, but there's no way to influence the direction they are going. These projects are 100% Google-run, and very few (if any) decisions are public.

For most projects there's also a significant proprietary part in the actual final product