Google Open-Sources the Latest Version of Its Windows Updater

Google has announced that it's released an updated version of its open source Google update tool. The tool is used internally by the company for several of its Windows desktop software, but the code is available under very liberal Apache license.

Now, Google has released the latest version of the tool, codenamed Omaha, to the community.

Google already uses Omaha 3 for Chrome, Picasa and other apps, and the new code can be compiled to recreate the Google Update binaries or re-used in your own project.

"In 2007, Google built the Google Update engine to provide a common background automatic updater for all of its products on Windows, and released it to open source as the Omaha project," Ryan Myers, Software Engineer at Google, wrote.

"Over the past few years Google has continued to improve Omaha, and we're happy to announce that the third major release of Omaha has now been released as open source," he announced.

One of the major touting points of Omaha 3 is a completely new API. The API uses a new state model which can be exposed through COM. Google says this enables better control of the update process and allows for better feedback.

The new version also provides better feedback to developers by using more detailed logs. On the same page, Omaha 3 provides more detailed info on successful as well as failed updates.

Google is making the code available via Google Code under the permissive Apache License 2.0.

Google releases a lot of its products as open source. Granted, it's not the greatest community builder out there, but some of the code that it's providing has been reused, successfully by others.

Even Mozilla uses some Google Chrome code for Firefox, since it would have been a waste of resources to write the same thing again.