Google's Secret Weapon

In Redmond Magazine (no, really.)

It Ain't Over Until Blake Ross Sings

There are three names that most people would associate with Firefox. Ben Goodger, who works for Google, and whose blog is pretty quiet these days. Asa Dotzler, who has a articulate and bulging blog. And then there's Blake Ross, also with a lively blog, but probably better known for being the cover-boy of Wired when it featured Firefox.

Given his background - and the immense knock-on effect his Firefox work has had - Ross is always worth listening to. That's particularly the case for this long interview, because it's conducted for the Opera Watch blog, which lends it both a technological depth and a subtle undercurrent of friendly competition:

I think Opera is better geared toward advanced users out of the box, whereas Firefox is tailored to mainstream users by default and relies on its extension model to cater to an advanced audience. However, I see both browsers naturally drifting toward the middle. Firefox is growing more advanced as the mainstream becomes Web-savvier, and I see Opera scaling back its interface, since it started from the other end of the spectrum.

(Via LXer.)

Mozilla Dot Party 2.0

For me, one of the most exciting chapters of Rebel Code to write was that called, rather enigmatically, "Mozilla Dot Party", which described the genesis of the open source browser Mozilla.

Thanks to the extensive historical records in the form of Usenet posts, I already had a pretty good idea where GNU/Linux came from, but the reasons behind the dramatic decision of Netscape - the archetypal Web 1.0 company - to release its crown jewels, the code for its browser Navigator, as open source, were as mysterious as they were fascinating (at least insofar as they went beyond blind despair). So the chance to talk with some of the key people like Eric Hahn and Frank Hecker, who made that happen, and to begin to put the Mozilla story together for the first time was truly a privilege.

But it was only the start of the story. My chapter finished in April 1999, at the point where another key actor in the story, Jamie Zawinski, had resigned from Netscape, despairing of ever seeing a viable browser ship. (Parenthetically, his self-proclaimed "gruntle" and blog are some of the most entertaining geek writing out there. His "nomo zilla" forms the basis for the closing pages of my Mozilla chapter.)

What I didn't know at the time was that Mozilla would eventually ship that browser, and that from the original Mozilla would arise something even more important for the world of free software: Firefox. Unlke Mozilla, which was always rather a worthy also-ran - fiercely loved by its fans, but largely ignored by the vast majority of Net users - Firefox showed that open source could be both cool and populist.

Given this background, I was therefore delighted to come across (via Slashdot) chapter 2 of the story in the form of a fascinating entry in the blog of Ben Goodger, the lead engineer of Firefox. What is particularly satifying is that he begins it in early 1999 - at precisely the moment that mine stops. Is that art or what?

Google: Friend or Foe?

"Don't Be Evil" is the company motto: but is Google for us or against us?

I'm not talking about justifable concerns that it knows far too much about what interests us - both in terms of the searches we carry out and (if we use Gmail) the correspondence we send and receive. This is a larger issue, and relates to all the major online companies - Microsoft, Yahoo, even Amazon - that mediate and hence participate in much of our lives. What concerns me here is whether Google can be considered a friend of openness.

On the one hand, Google is quite simply the biggest open source company. Its fabled server farm consists of 10,000s/100,000s/1,000,000s (delete as applicable) of GNU/Linux boxes; this means that anyone searching with Google is a GNU/Linux user.

It has a growing list of code that it has open-sourced; it has sponsored budding hackers in its Summer of Code programme; and it keeps on acquiring key open source hackers like Guido van Rossum (inventor of Python) and Ben Goodger, (Firefox lead engineer).

On the other hand, Google's software is heavily weighted towards Microsoft Windows. Programs like Google Earth and Picasa are only available under Windows, and its latest, most ambitious foray, the Google Pack, is again only for Microsoft's operating system. This means that every time Google comes out with some really cool software, it is reinforcing Microsoft's hold on the desktop. Indeed, we are fast approaching the point where the absence of GNU/Linux versions of Google's programs are a major disincentive to adopt an open source desktop.

This dilemma is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, since Google clearly wants to serve the largest desktop market first, while drawing on the amazing price-performance of free software for its own computing platform.

But there is another area where it has the chance to play nice with openness, one that does not require it to come down definitively on one side or the other of the operating system world.

Another Windows-only product, Google Talk, is the subject of a lawsuit alleging patent infringement. However, closer examination of the two patents concerned, Patent Number 5,425,085 - "Least cost routing device for separate connection into phone line" - and Patent Number 5,519,769 - "Method and system for updating a call rating database", suggests that one of the best ways Google could show that it is a friend of both open source and proprietary software is by defending itself vigorously in the hope that the US Patent system might start to be applied as it was originally envisioned, to promote innovation, not as an easy way of extracting money from wealthy companies.

Update 1: Google has come out with a Mac version of Google Earth. It's a start.

Update 2: There are rumours about Google working on its own desktop GNU/Linux. Frankly, I'll believe it when I see it: it's a poor fit with their current portfolio, and the margins are terrible.

Update 3: Comfortingly, these rumours have now been scotched.