> Ian mentioned that "Google" as a company doesn't actually choose to do a > lot. The Go team is largely autonomous in their decision making and isn't > being influenced by executives. > So, to put it another way: If the only role the company plays is to > provide paychecks to some Go developers, does it actually exercise or have > any significant level of ownership? > >
I see a couple ways to look at the Go team. One is as a team that is independent of Google and is staffed with people who work at Google. The other is as a department within Google. As Google owns the trademark, Go sites are under the Google policies, only Google employees are on the team, there have been internal processes that are not public, and the governance isn't documented publicly I'm led down the road of it being a department withing Google. Like the GMail team is an organization within Google. Then there is the issue of ownership, which provides the right of control. When it comes to this, I'm not entirely clear. I happy to believe Ian that senior execs have not exercised control over the project. That doesn't mean Google doesn't own the project. Has it relinquished it's right to control? Have the Googlers on the Go team relinquished control to members in the community? Google engineers have retained control including Russ who is a Principal Engineer (exec level?). When I say I'm not clear that's because I'm reminded of a Steve Francia talk at a DrupalCon recently. He talked about Go and the community structure. What he would like to see. I don't see that happening in the community or with the Go team. I'm not sure of the relationship of the Go team to the community or the ongoing intent. For reference, the video is up at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJo9tPXGPo8 > 2) The go team at Google has had processes that are not public. One >> example is the proposal review process. There has long been a group at >> Google that decides these. For a long time this wasn't documented publicly >> but happened. The public documentation on it came after the decision on go >> modules. >> > > Note that the documentation still says "some members of the Go team". Not > "the Google-employed members of the Go team" (i.e. not everyone at Google > has access to those meetings) and not "a Google-internal set of people" > (i.e. people outside Google aren't categorically excluded from them). > The Go team is only made of Googlers. Why is that? What does one need to do to join the Go team and not be at Google? None of this is publicly available knowledge. It's currently treated as a department within Google. > > >> 3) how has no one outside of Google qualified for the core team >> > > I don't think this is true at all. There are several people who got hired > into the Go team from outside of Google directly. See above hypothetical > (and Ian's point): Google tends to try to hire people they think are > qualified to work on Go. And it tends to succeed. > So, to join the Go team one needs to be hired into Google? So, Red Hat (as an example) can't have someone on staff who is on the Go team? That kinda speaks to the point that this is a Google project. If it wasn't someone from Microsoft, Red Hat, or one of the many other companies who are invested in Go could be on the core team without going to be employed by Google. > > As a concrete example: Cloudflare pretty heavily uses Go. When a > cloudflare-employee started stepping up to work more and more on the Go > crypto stack, they got hired by Google to do it fulltime. At least from the > outside, that seems to what happened with Filippo Valsorda. > That's fantastic. This shows some open source in action. It also highlights that this isn't open governance. If it did, Filippo joining the core team would have been a separate event from joining Google. > So, again, the explanation Ian gave seems pretty reasonable: Doing core > work on Go is a fulltime job, Google seems willing to foot the bill for > that fulltime job and people seem willing to let them. > I bet there are others who are willing for foot the full time bill for core Go work. The current state of things doesn't allow for that. If this sounds like I'm arguing for open governance, that wasn't my intent. I'm just trying to continue the point that kicked all of this off. The Go is Google's project. It does not have open governance. If this is ok or not is an exercise for others to make. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/555dbcc3-0c51-4a03-b261-b57a79a740a9%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
