[benatkin]

Google may not be much worse than other FANGs, but the way it pretends to be friendly to open source and free culture communities and co-opts them is nasty.

"Despite illusions in 2008–2009 that it was a fair player, Google is now trashing free culture by making all the Picasa Web images in Creative Commons vanish from the web.

In fact, users and albums are often forced to "migrate" to Google Plus, without telling them that any Creative Commons marking will be irreversibly destroyed in the process. There's no way to mark Creative Commons images on Google Plus. There's also no way to search or browse Picasa Web by license, apparently (the feature used to exist in 2009)."

https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Picasa

[pkaye]

If you care about free culture, don't put it up on a private (company) service. Most things on the web have not guarantee of longevity. The only thing open source about Google is some of the software licenses they use.

[jrockway]

> pretends to be friendly to open source

I quite like go and Kubernetes.

[benatkin]

That was meant to be parsed out as "open source communities".

When it's in their own self-interest I'm not sure whether they're being friendly or not. Can't really tell.

Also go feels a bit tightly controlled to me and like it's not carrying on the traditions of open source scripting languages (same with Swift). Fortunately, Rust and Elixir are shaping up to be good continuations of the culture of Perl/Python/Ruby/etc.

[valker43]

> When it's in their own self-interest I'm not sure whether they're being friendly or not. Can't really tell.

Does it have to be mutually exclusive. Sure, Google is hoping you're going to go GKE for your Kubernetes/Container needs. But you're completely free to use another cloud, or roll your own.

For all cloud native backend stuff I really love Go (and Rust for that matter).