Guido at Google

[Fuzzyman]

Alex Martelli wrote:
> Fuzzyman <fuzzyman at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > That's potentially very good news. (Or slightly sinister -depending on
> > your paranoia levels).
> >
> > You got any references on that ?
>
> I don't think there was any official announcement, but it's true -- he
> sits about 15 meters away from me;-).
>

Cool - pass on my regards and thanks to him. ;-)

>
> > I was just thinking that the open source offerings from google are
> > actually pretty pitiful - considering the time investment they have put
> > into developing software systems. (Summer of Code not-withstanding of
> > course).
>
> The key technical person for opensource at Google isn't Guido and isn't
> me -- rather, I'd focus on Greg Stein (whose contributions to open
> source have been very wide-ranging, and who's been our engineering
> manager for opensource for quite a while now... not a secret, you can
> read about that on Greg's own blog).  If you want more opensource from
> us, he's most probably the best person to bug about it!-).  I'm sure
> that, being the chairman of the Apache Software Foundation (the VP of
> the ASF is also a Google employee), he can bend your ears about that;-).
>

Well, employing key open-source personnel and supporting them in their
work *probably* counts as helping the open-source world.

OTOH they (you...) must have worked on/with tremendous systems - like
load balancing software as one example off the top of my head. I guess
these are the competitive edge of google - and also there is a lot of
work turning in house systems into 'released' ones, even if the will is
there.

Even so - the code that has been directly released by google is
relatively slender.

>
> > I wonder if this heralds google finally upgrading from Python 2.2 ;-)
>
> We currently use multiple versions of Python, and I personally don't see
> that changing overnight.  But, we'll see.
>

I've no axe to grind on that one.

All the best,

Fuzzyman
http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/index.shtml

> 

> Alex