Please describe your duties at Google.
Officially I do External Developer Relations for Google’s open source software and Web APIs. This means managing the blogs on code.google.com, attending conferences and establishing/maintaining relationships with developers, and growing our team. I also help the Blogger team with some product management stuff, since I worked on Blogger in a variety of roles for about three years and have fairly deep knowledge of the product/space.
How did you come to work at Google?
My friend Katie joined Google’s AdWords team back in mid-2002, and we stayed in touch as I was backpacking around the world that year. I knew I wanted to work at Google, as I’d long been a Google user and fan, but I wasn’t sure what specifically I wanted to do there until they announced the Blogger acquisition in 2/2003. (I’d also been a Blogger user since its early days). I was in Southeast Asia when this happened, and emailed Katie asking her to let me know the second a Blogger job opened up. A month or so later the Blogger team started hiring for their Support team, and by then I’d moved to the SF Bay Area and was crashing at my Aunt’s place in Woodside. The timing was perfect, and I started a week after interviewing – this was about three and a half years ago, in April 2003.
What is your current 20% personal project?
As you might imagine, the 20% thing is a fairly broad concept. Since I’m not a software engineer, I try to help other teams with blogging and web/community stuff. So I guess my 20% project is helping Karen Wickre (from Google PR) admin all the various Google Blogs. These days there are 30+ ‘official’ Google Blogs, from country/market/language-specific blogs to product blogs to developer blogs, all with different team members posting from local offices around the globe.
Are you involved with any open source project outside of Google?
Not directly/actively – I tend to let work keep me pretty busy…
Can you discuss the Linux penetration within Google? Is it true that a hacked/tweaked version of Ubuntu is in use? If so, what sort of hacking/tweaking has been done?
Google’s engineers use Goobuntu on their desktops, which Chris talked a bit about here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175746&cid=14609148.
Is there any use of *BSD within Google? If so, in what type of applications/uses?
I don’t know.
Can you discuss the proprietary nature of software like Picasa and Google Earth? Is there any hope of these becoming open sourced?
Picasa and Google Earth are awesome apps, but we’re still tinkering with them to provide the best user experience possible.
Of the different projects Google has currently open sourced, is there one in particular that stands out in your mind? Why?
Probably Tesseract, since it’s got such an interesting backstory: http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2006/08/announcing-tesseract-ocr.html
Can you give us a brief overview of the new Open Source Project Hosting and what Google hopes to accomplish with it? How will it be better than alternatives such as Sourceforge?
Project hosting on Google Code is collaborative development environment that offers a few things:
1. project workspaces with simple membership controls
2. version control with Subversion
3. issue tracking
4. mailing lists via groups.google.com
Google is deeply rooted in open source, and we want to make it easy for others to develop their own innovative open source projects and applications. Google Code’s hosting is a simple, reliable way for users to organize and track their innovations…
Do open source release engineers truly get to decide the license under which the software will be released? There can be a big difference for software released under GPL versus BSD licensing. Is Google management comfortable enough with the difference in licenses to allow that? Are there any guidelines for picking a license, such as the license must be OSI approved?
I didn’t know an exact answer here so I checked with Chris: “We generally default to the Apache license, but have used others when it made sense, like with Libjingle. The license must be OSI-approved, first tier, and it is done through the Open Source Programs Office” (which is the name of our team at Google).
Have you read any good books recently?
Definitely – I’m always reading! I’m a huge Neal Stephenson fan and finally made time to read Quicksilver and The Confusion on recent trips to Thailand and Africa, and I’m currently digging into The System of the World. I’ve also recently completed Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail. I really dig audiobooks too, and recently finished listening to Richard Gere narrate the Dalai Lama’s latest book (The Universe in a Single Atom – highly recommended). I keep track of all this stuff on AllConsuming: http://allconsuming.net/person/case/
