Really? Google's once rosy history with open source project isn't looking too friendly these days.

And yeah ECMA is a totally open standard with committee members from all sorts of companies and backgrounds. Dart is not. I don't care if JS is slightly worse, as least I know that for now and the foreseeable future I won't be paying a google tax to use it.

After the open source community "stole" mapreduce and hbase google has begun offering maglev and spanner as "services" rather than giving them to the OSS community. Maglev was supposed to be open sourced a while ago, and google now offers DDoS protection service on Google cloud instead, most famously with their Krebs PR stunt. Maybe they forgot about it? Did I mention they removed "don't be evil" as their motto a while back because it was "immature"?

Google has begun down a decidedly different path since the Alphabet transition a while back. It's no longer the brainchild of Sergey and Larry, it's losing its soul and becoming a shareholder cash machine. Maybe the floundering of some of their moonshot projects is taking a toll on the companies' confidence to remain a market leader while maintaining their traditional values of openness and shunning of questionable marketing tactics? I'll admit that's pure speculation but I really wish I knew what happened to the Google I remember.

Since I'm being accused of FUD I might as well throw a bunch more speculation in for the hell of it. Their most recent papers are conspicuously lacking enough detail to make your own implementation, and read more like marketing whitepapers on how to use their services and how great they are. Their tensorflow library was probably released as truly open only because they couldn't hire enough devs with machine learning experience to meet their needs. They needed to introduce the world to enough of the secret sauce to meet their own demand and they remain completely silent on how their real moneymakers work.

My extreme speculation? They started using machine learning for search a few years back and found out just how easily their previous search algorithms, developed and perfected for years, were utterly outclassed within months. A start-up with these techniques could have been their undoing. This oversight cannot be repeated, they cannot offer too much of their technology back to the world anymore lest they risk being beaten to death by their own weapons. Thus google threw away a lot of what made them google, and rebuilt themselves as a semi monopolistic oligarch that's much more in line with traditional too big to fail companies.

They now spend more on political lobbyists than any tech company by far. They like to release nice things for free when a competitor just happens to be a making a decent living charging for the same thing. They engage in a lot of the typical corporate warfare now that doesn't seem natural for a company with a nice playful exterior and an original motto of "don't be evil".

As far as the FUD accusation, does it count that I don't work for or with any company that has anything to do with google or the other tech giants? These are just my opinions based on observations, and a lot of those opinions are backed by verifiable facts.

You're free to put the same data together and make your own conclusions, which would lead to more interesting discussion than dismissing my points just because.