Interview with Google’s open source director Chris DiBona
The phrase “Summer of Code” may send shivers down some people’s spines, but Chris DiBona, open source program manager at Google, tells Oliver Lindberg how such “outreach” initiatives have transformed the open source movement in remarkable ways
This article originally appeared in issue 163 of .net magazine in 2007.
There’s hardly a company in Silicon Valley that’s embracing the open source movement more than Google. The search engine giant regularly releases open source code on code.google.com (most recently, the complete Google Web Toolkit, a Java tool that enables you to easily create slick Ajax web interfaces). Google also takes part in and funds open source projects (more than $1.5m last year), collaborates with open source companies such as the Mozilla Foundation, generates new developers through the Summer of Code and runs a lot of open source software — including the Linux kernel — on its own machines. As if this wasn’t enough, Google’s open source team is currently working on a programme to transfer huge amounts of data up to 120 terabytes in size. The man behind all of this? Chris DiBona.
As open source program manager, Chris is responsible for compliance, outreach and correctness around open source. When Google’s engineers want to use a piece of open source software or release a piece of software as open source, these days usually under the Apache licence (“it’s very friendly to both open source and commercial folks”), Chris team comes into action. He reviews the suggestion with legal experts and checks whether it’s got anything to do with the ranking function.
“If it does, we don’t release it,” says Chris. “We’re not going to release things like PageRank because that would be really unfair. What you have to realise is that if the world knows how PageRank works, the index would become polluted with spam. But the rest of the stuff is fair game. There’s very little that we can t make open source here.”
Summer of Code
Chris, who previously worked as a Slashdot editor, games developer and private consultant in cryptography, and now also co-hosts TWiT’s free/open source-themed podcast, FLOSS Weekly, was given free reign when he joined Google in 2005: “They said go to it , and at Google they really mean go to it .” He was asked to do “something around open source outreach” and came up with the Summer of Code, an annual programme in which Google encourages students to work on open source projects in exchange for cash prizes. Chris calls it “our way of creating more open source developers and more open source code”, and in its first year, Google received more than 8,000 applications for 200 available positions. The programme was promptly expanded. Last year, Google funded over 600 students in 93 countries to work with 100 open source groups.
“One of the things that I really like about the Summer of Code is this really cool effect it’s had on the open source community,” Chris enthuses. “We have a ton of projects that have already signed up and applied to work with us, folks like the Jabber Software Foundation. And last year, for the GNU Compiler project, we had a student, maybe 19 or 20 years old, who changed how a certain option worked in the GNU Compiler Collection, one of these programs that s insanely complicated. Just getting acquainted with the code of GCC was pretty remarkable and then he made this change that’s going out to literally millions of developers all over the world. Students don’t usually get a chance to do that. If you’re in science school, you’re often exposed to very important things like the algorithms behind computers and languages, but it’s really hard to be exposed to actual user needs while you’re in a college programme. Through the Summer of Code, you can make a difference in users lives.”
It’s these experiences and the freedom to turn his passion into his job that’s immensely valuable to Chris. “I wouldn’t be able to do what I do here anywhere else. I m able to do more with the open source community than I’ve ever been able to do. That’s what Google is for me: this ability to make a real difference in the world. I’ve been able to change the lives of thousands of students through the Summer of Code, and thousands of developers, by releasing open source code. And I’ve been able to make Google’s life better by making it possible to use all this open source software safely.”
“I’ve been able to change the lives of thousands of students and developers through the Summer of Code, by releasing open source code”
Good for Google
Although they’re not actually open source, Chris DiBona is also involved in releasing developer APIs. He makes sure they’re accessible, fair, and that open source developers can use them without fear of changing their code. Recently, for example, Google released the Ajax Search API, a JavaScript tag for including Google Search on websites. The decision to stop supporting its SOAP Search API wasn’t popular among developers, however, as the Ajax API wasn’t as flexible.
“The SOAP API had been under-supported inside the company for some time,” Chris explains, “and we made the decision that it was better to start deprecating the API than to allow something that was unreliable and flaky to continue to represent us. It s not like we re shutting off websites, the SOAP API still works if you have an API key. I think it wasn’t really clear that people were getting their search results from Google, and one of the things we try to focus on when we release an API is that users still understand there’s some Google going on there.”
In fact, it’s crucial for Google: the end user needs to know that a certain gadget is coming from Google and that the developer needs to get a great experience out of it. That’s why it’s important for Google to work with outside developers. “We’re dealing with people who are creating software that’s going to run in future versions of Google. But on the other hand, we want to work with outside developers on these APIs, so they’re able to bring the richness of Google into their web applications. It helps them develop in the way that we do. We have a saying around here: what’s good for the internet is good for Google . And we think a lot of these APIs are very good for the internet.”
“I worry about the effects of software patents and the legalities around open source. They can be awfully intimidating for developers”
Getting stricter
In the future, Google plans to release a lot more developer tools and more web-based APIs. There’s competition, of course. Jimmy Wales, for instance, has announced plans for an open source search engine towards the end of the year, with the goal of claiming as much as five per cent of the search market. Chris remains relaxed about this threat to Google’s dominance: “We think that Jimmy’s approach is worth him trying, and we look forward to seeing how he does with it. We think that the more ways that people have to get at information, the better.”
However, he has other issues on his mind. “I worry about the effects of software patents and the legalities around open source. They can be awfully intimidating for developers. And some people are trying to say things are open source that aren’t. It’s something that bugs me. I really hope that the Open Source Initiative reasserts and maybe even tries to get the term “open source” trademarked. There’s all this amazing open source code out there, and then there are some very small companies with a lot of PR and money that say they’re open source when they’re not. If people are going to say they’re open source, I hope they use licences like the GPL, the BSD and the Apache licence, and don’t make something up that people can’t use.”
Chris won’t get bored at Google any time soon. The company has understood how much flexibility open source provides for itself and developers, so he has plenty to do. His passion for open source also shows no sign of waning. He compares it to realising, at age 12, that if the computer breaks, it’s your fault, but if it succeeds, it’s down to you as well. Open source preserves the satisfaction of his discovery.
Chris is still the director of open source at Google.
This article originally appeared in issue 163 of .net magazine in 2007. Photography by Sandra Silbereisen.
