Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> No, no proprietary code was used, the port was done from the Open source Java clone Jake2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake2 We ported it by using Google Web Toolkit Java->JS compiler, and replaced OpenGL with WebGL,

That sounds like you wrote code, code on which Google holds copyright, and you really need to read up on the Google company policy on that. I'm not sure you understand fully what distinct things copyright and software licenses are, and how Google policies apply to them.

There's a reason people who join Google have historically "disappeared" from open source: It's because they can't just contribute.

Back when you did this it definitely was explicitly and strongly violating policy. Nowadays maybe it could get away without opensource review by counting it as a "patch".

https://opensource.google/docs/patching/#no-review



I'm pretty sure when we did this, we didn't just drop it without talking with anyone, after all, it uses proprietary assets and we presented it at I/O. It's been a long time, but IIRC, Chris DiBona was involved at least as far as getting an opinion (I don't recall if OSPO existed back then), as well as some lawyercats because of the proprietary assets it dynamically loads. This was semi-official, it was shown at all-hands by Eric, the media team helped us create the trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhMN0wlITLk), it was hosted by Chrome DevRel who deal with OSS releases all the time, so this wasn't just some random engineers off doing a secret private project and uploading it unannounced.

My first few years at Google, I worked almost exclusively on official OSS projects (no google3 commits).

Edit: looking at the trailer, I forgot we released this on April 1, as an April Fools joke. LOL


Ah. Yeah ok that paints a different picture than your other comments.

I'd hate to see people get in trouble after reading what you wrote and reason their way to thinking because it's opensource and their own time they can do what they want.


No biggie, my initial wording was problematic. I really only wanted to express at the time I was racing to get a private demo ready for TGIF that we could link people to, and I ended up having to use AWS which was frustrating.

For the most part, I think most Googlers are thoughtful about the rules, god knows we go through enough training decks, but also as a xoogler? you know Googley behavior means people are pretty reasonable about obeying license restrictions and adhering to desires of OSS authors.

Although as the number of employees at Google skyrocket, the probability of bad actors increases and company culture was probably much different than when there were only 5-10k employees vs >100k




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: