Google launches new website to bring together all of its open source projects

Google has launched a new website as the home for all of its open-source content. Google Open Source brings together the company’s related initiatives — including Android, Chromium and Go — in one spot and provides information on how it develops and maintains them.

Google says the website delivers the expected things such as supported organizations and a comprehensive list of the company’s ongoing open-source projects, but it says it “Also contains something unexpected: a look under the hood at how we ‘do’ open source.”

Google states that its commitment to open source has lead it to publish its own internal documentation on how it makes these initiatives work. The documents cover how Google manages the release of projects and also reveals why the company pursues what it does.

“Our policies and procedures are informed by many years of experience and lessons we’ve learned along the way,” writes Google in its announcement post. “We know that our particular approach to open source might not be right for everyone—there’s more than one way to do open source—and so these docs should not be read as a “how-to” guide. Similar to how it can be valuable to read another engineer’s source code to see how they solved a problem, we hope that others find value in seeing how we approach and think about open source at Google.”

I expect the website will be an excellent resource for the developers involved, or interested in getting involved, with these projects — it isn’t lacking in detail.

You can listen to the backstory of the website’s development in the latest Changelog podcast here.