OStatic

Who's the first company you think of when the words open source come up in conversation? Red Hat? Canonical? MySQL? Well, if Google co-founder Larry Page is to be taken seriously, apparently it ought to be Google.

We've previously covered some of the (minor) controversy surrounding the choice of licenses for projects hosted at the Google Code site. In a nutshell, the Google open source folks are concerned about the proliferation of free and open source licenses, and one way in which they choose to make a stand is by limiting the licenses that projects on their site can use. As they point out, there are plenty of other hosting sites you can use - but being Google, their opinion does have some weight.

We've been keeping an eye on Google's Android phone project as it progresses towards release this fall. Yesterday another key piece of the support services behind Android was announced, and this one looks like a win from the open source point of view: anyone will be able to offer Android software via a free Android Market.

When last we looked at Google's Android mobile phone OS project, there were some rumblings of discontent in the developer community. This week, though, developers have a lot less to complain about (though, perfectionists that most of us are, we can still find a few issues). That's because Google has pushed out an 0.9 beta version of the SDK, making its vision for the first Android release much clearer.

Google is on a roll. Hot on the heels of releasing its internal Protocol Buffers data interchange format, it has open-sourced Google XML Pages (GXP). Though the project page reports this as version 0.2 beta, don't be fooled: according to a presentation about the technology, this is the templating language behind AdWords, Blogger, Google Reader, Google Analytics, and other properties.

As it continues its sometimes-rocky march to an actual release, Google's Android mobile phone platform is now fighting a sort of internal revolt from upset developers. The problem stems from the unsteady release rate of the Android SDK, a necessary tool for anyone who wants to build applications for Android phones.

Google Browser Sync was a reasonably popular Firefox 2.0 add-on from Google Labs. Like Mozilla's Weave (which is still having some early teething pains), Browser Sync was designed for people using Firefox on more than one machine, keeping bookmarks, history, and saved passwords the same on those machines. But you'll notice the past tense: for whatever reason, Google decided not to update Browser Sync for Firefox 3.0, and discontinued the project last month.

The open source folks at Google seem to be on a roll lately, pushing out some of the key pieces of the company's internal infrastructure as open source projects. The latest addition on this front is the prosaically-named Protocol Buffers. Depending on your application requirements and choice of language, Protocol Buffers may provide an efficient replacement for other data interchange formats such as XML.

Microsoft's chief software architect Ray Ozzie gave a talk this morning at the Sanford Bernstein Strategic Decisions conference, one of those gatherings for top-level executives. As part of the Q&A, he was asked about the perception that Google was a disruptive force that was hard for Microsoft to deal with. While admitting that Google was a tough competitor, Ozzie went on to focus on something he called even more potentially disruptive : open source.

OK, so there aren't really that many secrets about the open web - all of the HTML and CSS and Javascript code is out there for the taking. But there is a lot of knowledge about how best to work with these standards, given the crazy mix of browsers and operating systems that web developers need to put up with, and much of that knowledge is hard to come by. The new Google DocType project is an attempt to codify and spread some of this knowledge.