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by arihant 4121 days ago
I always wondered why Google didn't spin off some of this as open source projects.

It seems to me that the bottleneck wasn't the hosting, but the man hours being wasted on them. Google could have reduced their involvement to providing an API and the development could have been managed by community.

It's easier said than done, obviously. Maybe the bottleneck was psychological and focus related, and they wanted to wipe the slate clean?
2 comments
rogerbinns 4121 days ago
I suspect that most used large amounts of internal Google libraries and was structured to work on Google's storage backends. Consequently it would be a phenomenal effort to strip that out, or make it sufficiently abstract so it has a hope of running elsewhere.

It is notable that Google doesn't internally use services. If for example they wrote everything to work on appengine/cloud in exactly the same way and APIs as outsiders do, then spinning out would be a lot easier. http://steverant.pen.io/

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Navarr 4121 days ago
Some of their projects were, see "Google Wave" (now "Apache Wave") [1]

[1]: http://incubator.apache.org/wave/

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