The new website ‘opensource.google.com‘ is aimed at bringing all the Google Open Source initiatives along with information on how it uses, releases, and supports open source. “This new site showcases the breadth and depth of our love for open source. It will contain the expected things: our programs, organisations we support, and a comprehensive list of open source projects we’ve released. But it also contains something unexpected: a look under the hood at how we ‘do’ open source,” wrote Will Norris, software engineer at Google’s Open Source Programs Office. This means that it will include information about Google’s release process for new projects, how to submit patches to other projects and how the company handles third-party open source projects it uses internally. “Our policies and procedures are informed by many years of experience and lessons we’ve learned along the way,” according to Norris. “We know that our particular approach to open source might not be right for everyone–there’s more than one way to do open source–and so these docs should not be read as a ‘how-to’ guide. Similar to how it can be valuable to read another engineer’s source code to see how they solved a problem, we hope that others find value in seeing how we approach and think about open source at Google.” With this new initiative, it may be worth having a look at Google’s several projects and software that it makes everyday under open source licences ranging from larger projects like Kubernetes and TensorFlow, both of which have already created large ecosystems around them, to smaller projects such as Light My Piano, Neuroglancer and Periph.io.
