[tferris]

Pardon, you are totally misleading.

Google could do this—there are multiple options to silently wallgarden the user. Just check how much traffic Google moves. If they want they could arbitrarily redirect traffic and subtly punish user's not using their tools.

But that's not their culture. Just look at their products, how far they pushing the boundaries and still stay open, give back and contribute to the community. Look at V8, Dart, Go—all open, all free, all top-notch, all following the Internet's principles and look at Apple, FB—I see no groundbreaking innovation that's free or not protecting their walled garden. Even if Google has some hidden agenda with their products (like with Chrome) the products are always best-of-breed and never deadlock the user.

The point is: Google benefits of an open Internet, their business model is fully based on an open Internet. Therefore they will do everything to keep the Internet neutral, free and decentralized. In contrast, the bizmodels of Apple and FB do not rely on these values, they need walled gardens. Enough reasons to trust them less.

RE-EDIT: Took out later added passages as wished.

[j_col]

Facebook have given back plenty of open source to the dev community. Scribe (their federated logging server) and HipHop (their PHP compiler) come to mind immediately, but there may be others.

[zerostar07]

Their business tactics are ridiculously sleazy though. Aside from the google smear campaign fiasco last year, do you know that facebook does not allow AdSense advertising on it's 3rd party applications? They don't want FB ads performance to be compared with Google's (more profitable ads) on the same pages.

[j_col]

I somewhat agree. Frankly I'm no fan off Google, Facebook, or Apple. But pretending that one of them is more "open" then the other because they open source some software now and again is a falsehood: they are all for-profit corporations, with more in common with each other then what separates them, notions of culture aside.

[j_col]

> (please don't mention some minor FB side-products; Apple has tons of innovative products but none of them is free).

Please don't rewrite your original comment after I've responded, not cool.

[tferris]

You are right, I re-edited and took the passage out (as written below I wasn't able to reply before directly).

[j_col]

Thanks for that.

[mindcrime]

Scribe (their federated logging server) and HipHop (their PHP compiler) come to mind immediately, but there may be others.

Thrift[1] and Cassandra[2] as well, FWIW.

[1]: http://thrift.apache.org

[2]: http://cassandra.apache.org/

[rbarooah]

You've actually made my point for me. "Redirecting traffic and subtly punishing users" is far from a walled garden, and would lead to an instant backlash if detected.

As I said, they don't have the power to close the internet that you attribute to them. This has nothing to do with their culture, however great you might think it is.

[tferris]

Discussing a hairsplitting definition of a walled garden doesn't make sense here. Google do not deadlock wether users nor site owner/publishers (referred above as "users" as well) to use their products but they could as explained above (deadlock=walled garden).

[rbarooah]

It sounds as though you are now claiming that Google has already turned the Internet into a Walled Garden but are simply nicer in their policies than anyone else.

This is the first time I've heard anyone make this claim.