14 DAY TRIAL // Google has launched a new website where you can check out all the free and open-source software it has created over the years.
The company has strong ties to open-source software and it has never forgotten its roots. This year alone the company has open-sourced Chrome for iOS, a new file-sharing system called Upspin, E2EMail, which is an experimental end-to-end email encryption, and the Guetzli JPEG encoder.
"Free and open-source software has been part of our technical and organizational foundation since Google's early beginnings. From servers running the Linux kernel to an internal culture of being able to patch any other team's code, open source is part of everything we do. In return, we've released millions of lines of open-source code, run programs like Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in, and sponsor open-source projects and communities through organizations like Software Freedom Conservancy, the Apache Software Foundation, and many others," writes Will Norris, software engineer with Google's Open Source Programs Office.
All these projects can now be found at opensource.google.com, the site that the company created to tie together all of its initiatives with information on how open source is used, released and supported by Google.
"Google believes that open source is good for everyone. By being open and freely available, it enables and encourages collaboration and the development of technology, solving real world problems," Google says on the topic.
The more, the better
The company says it releases open source code based on the philosophy that "more is better." Basically, they don't know which projects will find an audience, so they're releasing code in large quantities so maybe someone finds something useful for their projects.
Norris explains that they've released thousands of projects under open-source licenses, ranging from the likes of TensorFlow,to smaller ones like Neuroglancer. As he points out, while some are fully supported, others are experimental and likely the result of Google's leisure coding weekly hours where employees come up with whatever projects they want.
"With so many projects spread across 100 GitHub organizations and our self-hosted Git service, it can be difficult to see the scope and scale of our open-source footprint," he adds.
There are over 2,000 projects you can scan through on Google's new site.