Google and Open Source

[Steve Bennett]

Google makes much of its friendliness towards open source. Some may say this is to distract people from noticing their virtual monopoly of search on the net. I'm not so cynical as there seems to be a lot of competitive activity in search these days - that plus the fact that Google continues to innovate and deliver great products and services.

Here is an interesting leaked internal presentation from Google. Take a look at page 8 where their internal 'Data Liberation Front' team is discussed.

Download Googlepresentation

They even have a manifesto that you can read on their Google Code Wiki (where else?!). Trouble is, there's nothing more than the manifesto there. Nothing about what they are actually doing.

Of more use are the tweets from a team member.

On the whole this seems like an interesting initiative as they seek (no pun intended - seek is a job search site in Oz) to liberate more data sets. More power to them.

Fellow blogger John Gordon has done some digging about this team and you can read about it on his blog Gordon's Notes.

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