Google Does More Than Just Show us the Code

Everyone loves Google, or so it often seems. For a long time, it has been my favorite search engine for finding general information on the Internet. Also, the sheer “coolness” of its work environment is legendary; I can remember when the company was looking to hire a gourmet chef for its cafeteria, not to mention an in-house masseuse. In a way, that very cool work environment substantially contributed to one of Google’s most recent moves. In mid-March, Google launched a website (Google Code) at which it provides the source code for some of its software tools for free.

Yes, you read that correctly. Google teamed up with Sourceforge to release several of its projects to the open source community. The four initial projects are named Perftools, sparsehashtable, coredumper and goopy/functional. These projects are in active use and development at Google, and being released under the BSD 2.0 new license.

Keep in mind that these are actual software tools. They aren’t applications per se, or environments in which to develop. They aren’t interfaces to use Google search, either; Google has a separate site specifically devoted to its APIs. They are tools for creating software -– in other words, tools to help programmers develop new software.

The projects initially released will be most interesting to C++ and Python programmers. Below is a list with descriptions of the tools, taken from the Google Code website:

• Perftools: libraries and tools that help programmers tune and debug multi-threaded C++ programs.
• Coredumper: gives programmers the ability to dump cores from programs when it was previous not possible.
• Sparsehashtable: an assortment of new hash tables for C++ developers.
• Goopy/functional: a library that brings functional language attributes to Python.

Granted, this is a fairly modest start, but then Google has a history of starting small and then building up momentum. This is really not bad for something that was six months in the making. Indeed, if you poke around the Google Code site, you’ll find a number of useful links, including ones to other open source projects and organizations, Google APIs, a frequently asked questions list, and the discussions mailing list. As with most areas on the Google website, you’ll be greeted with a clean, easy-to-use interface that makes it a snap to find everything you’re looking for.

So how is this exciting development a result of Google’s work environment? Well, the search engine allows and encourages its software engineers to spend one day per week –- that’s right, twenty percent of their work time –- working on their own personal projects. Many of the engineers at Google are interested in open source projects, so this website came about as part of a natural evolution process. Indeed, Chris DiBona, Google’s open source program manager, said that one of the reasons he was hired by the company was to help it interact more closely with open source developers than it has done so far.