Of course companies have ethics and morals. Companies are run by people.

Google more than most if we look at actions. The biggest was leaving China over principle and losing out on a ton of money versus Apple handing over their user data.

But there are so many more with Google. So many crazy ones.

Look at smartphones and Google continuing to give away Android for free. Even in China where there is not Google services and Google even lets Amazon use it for all their hardware.

Google doing this makes phones available to people that would not have the means otherwise. If just Apple they would be stuck.

But a huge one that is close to home is what Google has done for K12 in the US. Our school use to be all Apple but has now replaced the Apple with using Google for pretty much everything.

Our school is relatively wealthy but many are not has blessed as ours and Google offering ChromeOS for free and all the software makes it possible for these kids to have access to computer technology that without Google they would not.

But the big one for us is the analytics. Matching kids up to teachers is so,so,so important and can make a huge difference in a kids life. Previous it had been done by gut. Our school has moved to using the Google ecocystem and our school is a Google K12 showcase school. I forget what they call it. So they are working with our school to use analytics to match kid to teacher.

That just would never have happened or not for a long time without Google.

Also think about the schools that were using Microsoft before replacing with Google. We were lucky we had the money to buy Apple but some were not as lucky and the improvement will be far greater for the schools that were previously using Microsoft. Teachers have limited class time and Windows would cause them to lose a lot more class time dealing with silliness. Or more likely the laptops left in the corner has full of viruses and malware.

I can give countless other examples. Where would we be with data scientice without the Map/Reduce and GFS papers?

Why did Google give it away?

How about Borg and now we have K8s? Why did they give that away?

Or the source code to so many different systems. Or why on earth when you own the front and back end and come up with SPDY did you give it away? Then the standard group changes it and you still spend the money to make sure you are standard.

Probably one of the biggest is VP8 and VP9. The MPEG-LA was trying to exort us for license fees. Google not only gives away VP8 for free but then on top tells people they will protect them from patent infringement.

Google even gave it away to competitors.

Do you realize even though Google has tons and tons of IP they have not sued another company for infringement? I mean never! That helps all of us.

Waymo did go after Uber but that was not Google. I suspect Waymo will be handled differently as they are not giving everything away like Google.

The other case was a suit started by Moto before Google purchase that they let go.

Then we have Shellshock, Meltdown, Spectre, Heartbleed, Cloudbleed among others all found from Google.

Heck Google found the Cloudbleed bug and shared with Cloudflare for free including the mitigation even though they are freaking competitors!! Google spent money to help them. Now how on earth is that not morals? Doing the right thing? But what drives your posts?

Google shared the Meltdown mitigation with MS and Amazon so they could save money

I can not think of any tech company that has given back nearly as much as Google. So many times deciding to do what is right versus what would have made them a buck.

Can you name any company in history that has given back as much as Google? Look at the papers they have shared with things like Wavenet, and AlphaGo and BigTable and a big new one Google Beyond Corp and literally 100s of others?

Parc gave back a lot as well as Bell labs but if we look at the benefit to the industry I would say Google has given more. Part of it is the industry is also much bigger.

Long post but not what I care about. I am insanely curious by nature and I just have to know what drives the half truths over and over again you post on HN about Google?

Is it your job? Why?

It seems to be the only contribution you make to HN is to make something up or twist something over and over again.

Please share why?