A new home for Google Open Source(opensource.google.com) |
A new home for Google Open Source(opensource.google.com) |
Edit: Ah, here's the relevant blog post: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2017/03/a-new-home-for-goo...
[1]: https://opensource.google.com/projects/ganeti [2]: http://git.ganeti.org/?p=ganeti.git;a=summary
For example, apparently AGPL licensed projects can't be used at Google: https://opensource.google.com/docs/using/agpl-policy/
Google no doubt has some proprietary code that they would like to keep proprietary. Also they probably have code under other licenses that they would like to remain under those particular licenses.
("page=6" means no 6x clicking "Show more", then it loads the whole page - interesting)
[1] https://opensource.google.com/projects/search?q=%20&language=r
[2] https://opensource.google.com/projects/search?q=%20&language=scalaOh, wait, no, they killed that one. In about a year....
Google has never shut down a major product. The closest thing they've come to is shutting down Google Reader, which was popular in the tech crowd but not mainstream in any way. That hurt. I totally agree with feeling the pain here.
They've never shut down anything of consequence besides this. Lots of little experimental things but nothing of real value.
They've also transitioned lots of things which does not count as shutting it down because you can still use the damn product. Latitude became Google+ Locations which became Maps Locations. They changed the name. Big whoop.
From an end user perspective the meme is a total joke. From a developer perspective there's a bit more truth but it's not as bad as the joke entails.
Sure they shut down some APIs but they give months or even year+ notices and pretty much universally always have an API with roughly equivalent functionality to move to. They rarely leave devs in the cold. It has happened but the vast majority of the time you just swap a few lines or a module and you are back up and running with probably better features.
Their PR has taken a hit because people don't like to do their research. They just shit on Google because it's fun.
There's a lot of reasons to do this that go beyond recruiting not the least of which was our old site was getting super crufty..
The others were just created, presumably to be reddit-level-hilarious
If Google has 50+ projects, then it's best to just have a page with multiple rows, each row is a category, and upon click can expand down to what #3 looks like. Or perhaps just GitHub README... it's pretty nice to read.
[1]: https://netflix.github.io/ [2]: http://twitter.github.io/ [3]: http://etsy.github.io/
Firstly wayyy too much useless animation + distractions. This slows down every aspect of the interface making it annoying to use.
The default of showing just miniature icons of projects provides ZERO useful information. After clicking 'next' and waiting an eternity for the animation to finish, you are presented finally with some information, just a title and description.
In this mode there is no way to know when you've finished seeing all the projects in a category (no clear end).
The no ending is solved by changing the view to the grid based one. But guess what, grids fucking suck for text, they are good for images, we don't scan data grid by grid for sentences, this makes it insanely difficult to read, or skim - ie. read first four words, decide no interest in that particular project, now you have to keep moving your eyes right - which you would normally do if you're INTERESTED and since this is text, you're forced to look over more text from the project which you don't want - in a list view, your eyes go down to the next project, your brain has a clear new context.
And of course nowhere can you see latest commits, total commits, language etc. You know, stuff that matters.
The Debian Project last I checked (a year or two back) had over 60k software packages. It's got an interface for delivering those. Actually, several interfaces, and the ones I prefer and use are commandline and filter through grep, if they don't provide their own search interfaces.
And those are platforms which are noted ... for their relative lack of software availability. (I think that criticism is ... misguided in several ways, but on a sheer quantitative basis, there are some pale merits.)
If Google cannot figure out how to manage, organise, present, and offer useful search interfaces to a measely 2,000 pieces of software, then, with all due respect, get the fuck out of the way for someone who can.
Thx