[scrollaway]

This is why I love open source (as in source-available, not necessarily free-software). Transparency trumps everything.

Whoever chose to commit anonymously (or gave the order to) knew they were doing something shitty and didn't feel comfortable doing it "in public".

It doesn't prevent things like that from happening but it makes you question if it's the right thing to do. Sometimes that's the best we can hope for.

[geofft]

> Whoever chose to commit anonymously (or gave the order to) knew they were doing something shitty and didn't feel comfortable doing it "in public".

That isn't necessarily true (although it definitely seems possible in this case, especially given the choice of name). The other possible reason is that they knew they were doing something perfectly reasonable but controversial, that other people would dislike, and they didn't want the Internet pitchfork mob coming after them.

It is interesting that major corporate-run-open-source projects like Android have individual names associated by commits. It's a huge change from software engineering in general - the general public doesn't know what I personally do at work, and can't come after me for it - and there's not even a need for it for open-source reasons: since copyright is owned by Google, there's no requirement to identify the individual employee more precisely. Everything could have been committed by [e-mail].

If the person behind this commit had the position that they stand behind this commit but they only intend to stand behind it 40 hours a week and then they want to go home, I would sympathize with that.

[PhasmaFelis]

Deliberately breaking an existing feature that caused zero trouble to any past, present, or hypothetical future user is never, in any circumstances, "perfectly reasonable". It may be largely inconsequential, it may be cynically obvious, it may be not worth fussing about, but not "perfectly reasonable".

[alangpierce]

> caused zero trouble to any past, present, or hypothetical future

I'm sure this commit was largely motivated by business reasons, but it seems pretty reasonable from a forward-looking technical standpoint as well.

Google search on Android has gone far beyond an endpoint where you give it a string and it gives you a list of URLs; it gives smart autocomplete, you can search by voice (which is smarter than speech recognition + text search), it provides custom result widgets for various situations, etc. As the feature set expands, it becomes less and less reasonable to have a single client that works against an abstraction implemented by many competing backend services, so the idea of a "search engine picker" makes less and less sense. It's saner to just say "this is the Google search client, and other search services can write their own clients". For example, Bing has its own Android app with its own design and features not in Google search. (That's not to say it's fair; Bing needs to be a separate app, whereas Google search is a first-class part of Android.)

[Aaargh20318]

> Google search on Android has gone far beyond an endpoint where you give it a string and it gives you a list of URLs;

I can't remember ever asking for anything more than that though. It's what a search engine should do, and no more. I had to switch away from Google to DDG exactly because they stopped doing this (instead of providing links to the actual webpage they now embed AMP pages). Fortunately, iOS allows me to switch search providers.

[geofft]

> caused zero trouble to any past, present, or hypothetical future user

Yes, but I don't think that is true of this feature:

1. It's a feature. Features have inherent maintenance cost. A team can only support so many features, and new features generally come at the cost of other features being well-developed. A significant part of my day job involves killing features that technically work but require so much maintenance overhead that we can't effectively work on new things. This makes some existing users of those features unhappy. We're killing them anyway.

2. The change improved the level of corporate support for Android, thereby improving Android's future headcount and budget, thereby improving the ability for other features to get delivered. Trashing that on principle does harm users. There are plenty of dead and dying mobile OSes with a customizable search engine that aren't helping users in their current state.

[systoll]

> Deliberately breaking an existing feature that caused zero trouble to any past, present, or hypothetical future user is never, in any circumstances, "perfectly reasonable".

It's also not a realistic scenario.

Anyone who bought a Samsung Galaxy S from Verizon got a phone with Bing as the default search engine. Some of the people who bought that phone would've preferred Google.

Because of this feature, there was added additional effort in using the phone due to the need to switch the search engine. And likely some of them didn't even know about the option, and wound up with an experience worse than they would've without it being present.

Adding to this, there is malware that changes this setting.

I think this was a valuable option to have -- but there are no features that cause zero trouble to anyone.

[TeMPOraL]

Isn't this pretty much the same thing Microsoft got fined for with Internet Explorer back in the heyday era of PCs?

[kbenson]

I guess it's less of an issue when the major competition is not just doing something "pretty much" like Microsoft, but one step further in not allowing another browser at all besides Safari.

The competition is enough to get past that I guess. Or we're just in an age where monopolies aren't really litigated much. Either or both seem plausible to me.

[archi42]

That'd exactly my thought as well. Maybe Google Search is not big enough in terms of market share to trigger an investigation? Or the authorities didn't think of it?

[llampx]

Google learned from Microsoft and is much more politically savvy.

[gcb0]

you are complaining exactly about the change Google's anonymous coward added.

if that change wasn't made, you could change the default search in both cases. now thanks to Google greed you are stuck with Samsung choice of bing. suck to be you.

[gsnedders]

I wouldn't be surprised if part of the motivating factor is the fact the decision was made well above the person who wrote the code, and it wouldn't be fair for the person who wrote the code to take all the flack publicly. And, well, I'm unsurprised that the manager didn't end up with their name on it.

[millstone]

How does “transparency trumps everything” apply here? There’s nothing transparent about this. The anon tasked with committing this change surely had no influence on the decision, so it’s doubtful the OSS nature drove any questions.

[gnode]

The committer did so anonymously for the same reason executioners wear hoods. The executioner is only acting as an agent of the court, or in this case Google, to carry out a controversial act which they may not personally agree with.