RSSGoogle, the Meaning of Open, and an Attempt to Define Open Education
Dec 23
Open Source, Opinion, Technology curt bonk, google, jonathan rosenberg, open education, Open Source, openness No Comments
I just finished reading “The Meaning of Open” blog post written by Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management at Google. In this very long letter to Google employees, he basically lays out why the Internet should be open and uses open source and open information to make his case.
One thing I did notice is that although Mr. Rosenberg states that even as they advocate for “openness,” their flagship products are not (and will most likely never be) open:
While we are committed to opening the code for our developer tools, not all Google products are open source. Our goal is to keep the Internet open, which promotes choice and competition and keeps users and developers from getting locked in. In many cases, most notably our search and ads products, opening up the code would not contribute to these goals and would actually hurt users. The search and advertising markets are already highly competitive with very low switching costs, so users and advertisers already have plenty of choice and are not locked in. Not to mention the fact that opening up these systems would allow people to “game” our algorithms to manipulate search and ads quality rankings, reducing our quality for everyone.
Which brings me to an interesting point that discussed during Curt Bonk’s webinar the other day: what kind of business model will we need to use when everything is “open”? More