[AndrewKemendo]

How does the decision get made at Google to open source something?

I'm always confused about what gets shut down vs open sourced vs paid product.

[joshsimmons]

Hi there! I work in the Google Open Source Programs Office. Echoing what others have said, it's usually just a matter of an engineer or team deciding it's something they want to do. Other times, it's a strategic choice.

We open sourced our open source policies/docs a while back, so if you're so inclined you can dig deeper there. These two links will be of particular interest: https://opensource.google.com/docs/creating/ and https://opensource.google.com/docs/why/

[metzmanj]

+1

I can speak a little bit about what motivated us.

We saw from OSS-Fuzz (https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz) that this sort of thing could be widely useful and wanted non-open source code to benefit from making fuzzing easier.

[AndrewKemendo]

Thanks Josh! Love the meta-open sourcing.

[snazz]

I would guess that it has to do with the usefulness of the project outside of Google. This project could be applied to so many other things (as OSS-Fuzz demonstrates), so open-sourcing it makes perfect sense. It isn’t some kind of classified algorithm, either.

[asdkfjasl]

Open sourcing is usually pushed from the bottom. People decide they care about open sourcing their project at they push for it.