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You are conflating Google's code ten years ago with Google's current codebase. I think releasing 2002's Google open source would be far less revolutionary than you think. 2002 was, like, really long ago. C++? C++ was still largely pre-Standard in practice. GCC 3.x (which was the first release line with good C++98 support) was still in its infancy, and most universities still had GCC 2.95 installed until 2004 or 2005. Java? Java 1.4 wasn't released until February 2002. Do you remember Java from those days? Casts. Two, three, four casts per line. Generics wouldn't be introduced until late 2004, at which point Java would become usable. Python 2.2 was all the rage in 2002. I don't know about you, but I cry every time I have to write a Python script which works with 2.4 because of a busted old server. Decorators weren't even a glint in Guido's eye back then. Source control meant CVS. CVS. How about the Web? Well, IE6 was the new thing back in 2002, so there's that. Phoenix -- later renamed Firebird, later renamed Firefox -- was released late in 2002. Opera's leading feature was that it would reload your old tabs if you restarted it, which was great because it crashed every 15 minutes. Ajax was used by, like, two sites. Webmail meant Yahoo!. MySpace didn't even exist in 2002, let alone Facebook. People still used ICQ, although AIM was still more popular. KaZaA was still spelled with random capital letters in 2002, and people still used it. "Warcraft" meant the hot new game, Warcraft III. Ten years is a really long time in internet time. I don't think Google or Fogcreek would be hurt in the least by releasing their 10-year-old codebases, because their 10-year-old codebases are damn near useless by modern standards. |
What harm for Id Software was in open-sourcing Doom, Quake 1-3 ?
Several years ago Win2K code was leaked - what harm for Microsoft was in it? I suppose zero.