January 1, 2005

Google and Microsoft spat over Open Source

by brian_turner

A bitter argument has broken out between search engine rivals, after a Google employee called on the open source community to fix a number of database technology issues.

Adam Bosworth, in his blog entry Where have all the good databases gone, complained that consumer needs were not being focussed upon enough by open source developers, and stated:

My message is to the Open Source community that has, so ably, built LAMP (Linux, Apache and Tomcat and MySQL and PHP and PERL and Python). Please finish the job. Do for databases what you did for web servers. Give us dynamism and robustness. Give us systems that scale linearly, are flexible and dynamically reconfigurable and load balanced and easy to use.

Ex-Microsoft employee Krzysztof Kowalczyk in Google – we take it all, give nothing back launched into a critical attack on Google for a stance that sees the billion-dollar company benefiting financially from use of open source applications, without giving back: ï¿½gNot doing Evil is easy. Doing Good is the hard thing.ï¿½h

Dare Obasanjo, a member of Microsoft’s WebData XML development team, highlighted Kowalczykï¿½fs objections to the wider blogosphere, leading to ugly condemnation of Microsoft by a Google employee as like ï¿½gthe Naziï¿½fs.ï¿½h

Despite the closer developing ties that Google has been generating with the open source community, not least with Mozilla, as reported in Firefox strengthens ties to Google, there is currently no real public record of significant open source releases by Google.

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