"Open Source is Magic" Tech Talk with Chris DiBona

I arrived a few minutes late to this presentation on the account that I was eating lunch. It's funny, there was no time allotted in the schedule for lunch. We basically had to pick some time between a session to eat, so naturally, obtaining the food and consuming it took a little longer than 15 minutes. In general, the point of this presentation was to indicate why open source software is great, why google thinks it's great, and some ways that they're helping to advance the field. Something that has really been stressed throughout the conference is that Google really has built their entire foundation on free open source software. Even going back to the days of Sergey and Larry in dorm rooms, pretty much all of the software used to build Google has been open source. Chris also made the point that there is noone in the world who has not interacted with something driven by open source software, they just may not be aware of it. Aside from web searches using Google (which everyone has done in today's world right?), almost all embedded devices have C code that was combiled with the gcc (Gnu C compiler). Google itself has also done much to help further the field of open source, primarily in two methods. The first of which is releasing their custom patches to open source software back to the community. For instance, about a month ago Google announced that they will be providing the community with custom patches they wrote for MySql 4.x. Of course these patches were written by Googlers for Google optimizations, but once they were in the wild, they gained a lot of popularity and MySQL now has plans to incorporate the code into their 5.x code base.
http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2007/04/google-releases-patches-that-enhance.html
The second way in which Google is advancing the field of open source is with their Summer of Code efforts.
http://code.google.com/soc/2008/
Summer of Code is a way in which Google is providing college students a channel to stay involved with computer science throughout the summer, primarily through contributions to open source software projects. Google coordinates the efforts, and even awards students with monetary payment for their work. Everyone benefits.
Ultimately, Chris' point was that open source software is good for the Internet, and what is good for the Internet is good for Google.
I think that open source software really has potential in the enterprise. Finally companies are beginning to trust the open source licenses (there really aren't that many of them). Once legal departments become familiar with the licensing, I don't see why they wouldn't look forward to the opportunity to avoid the headachces that happen when processing a new license agreement for every new piece of proprietary software. Plus, it's free!