Google is giving its open-source projects and initiatives a new place to live. The company announced a new site, https://opensource.google.com/, designed to provide information on how Google uses, releases, and supports open-source software.
“This new site showcases the breadth and depth of our love for open source. It will contain the expected things: our programs, organizations we support, and a comprehensive list of open source projects we’ve released. But it also contains something unexpected: a look under the hood at how we ‘do’ open source,” Will Norris, engineering manager for Google’s open source office, wrote in a post.
The company is releasing a document on how it goes from creating an open-source project to how it uses it and how it grows it inside and outside the company. The documentation will provide the process for releasing projects, submitting patches, managing code, and why Google uses certain licenses.
In order to help developers find open-source projects, the company is also organizing its projects into a directory. The directory showcases specific projects as well as breaks them up into categories such as developer tools, Internet of Things, machine learning, programming and testing.
“Free and open source software has been part of our technical and organizational foundation since Google’s early beginnings. From servers running the Linux kernel to an internal culture of being able to patch any other team’s code, open source is part of everything we do,” Norris wrote.
