Google's Continuing & Numerous Contributions To Open-Source

Written by Michael Larabel in Google on 25 August 2016 at 01:23 PM EDT. 11 Comments
GOOGLE
Marc Merlin of Google presented at this week's LinuxCon 2016 event in Toronto how the company has -- and continues to -- contribute to open-source software.

For those that weren't at the Linux Foundation event, there are the PDF slides from the session. Highlights of Google's open-source contributions for those curious include:

- It started out difficult for Google contributing to the Linux kernel due to originally using dated kernels and many patches written against these trees that were far from mainline. They've since become a much greater contributor to the Linux kernel and are happily riding on closer to mainline trees. To date they have contributed more than 5,000 patches to the Linux kernel.

- Google has released several thousand papers on technologies like MapReduce and GFS.

- When it comes to Chrome OS and Android powered hardware, Google remains committed to working on open-sourcing every driver they can and pressuring hardware vendors to release specifications and/or open-source drivers.

- They have several developers where their primary job is working on upstream, external open-source projects like Samba and Git.

- More of their cluster software is being open-sourced.

- Google has more than 100 top-level organizations/projects on GitHub that release code, The Google organization itself has more than 800 products while in total Google has more than 3,000 open-source projects on GitHub.

- Google continues to not touch AGPL projects and only focuses on OSI-approved licenses.

- Google continues using their ProdNG Debian derivative on production machines. Their Linux desktops are still on their Ubuntu-dervied Goobuntu.

- Google sponsors more than 250 open-source events.

- Various financial contributions to the Linux Foundation, Software Freedom Conservancy, FSF, etc.

- And of course, the Google Summer of Code continues.

Check out the PDF slides for more details, including Marc Merlin's comments regarding open-source licenses at Google.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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