Chrome is good news for the ABM crowd

Sam Varghese
Friday, 05 September 2008 06:20

Opinion and Analysis

Had it been the GPL, then other companies would have been reluctant to pile in or even look at the code. But the BSD licence gives Google the aura of open source and serves its commercial ends too. Two birds have gone down with a single stone.

Does anyone think that the boo-boo with the Chrome end user licence was an innocent mistake? The bit which said that any content created with the browser would be Google's to exploit for any and every commercial opportunity? You think that was an accident? Remember this is the same company that created blogger.com - and fired one of its own employees for blogging.

No, Google has its own phalanx of lawyers, shrewd marketing people and smart employees who vet everything the company does. There's more spin in there than Shane Warne generated in his whole career (and, gentle reader, if you are unfamiliar with Warne and don'e want his whole bio, he was a great Australian spin bowler.)

The licence was meant to be that way and if nobody had made a fuss, it would have stayed as such. People don't complain when Google scans the inbox in your gmail account and sends them related advertisements do they? I'm looking at a mail from my editor Stan Beer right now in which we discussed some aspects of coverage - and up comes an ad about a technical writing company!

Yes, we are all slowly drinking the Google kool-aid. But to the ABM crowd, that's just fine. We can deal with the effects later.

Can someone tell me why is it that we prefer not to think long-term? I mean IBM was once the big bully in the computer industry. Then came Microsoft. There are others who are waiting in the wings as Microsoft, bloated and out-of-date - which company would throw $US10 million at a comedian in order to get people to try software which even a lame dog wouldn't piss on? - slowly suffocates.

One monopoly is as bad as any other. That's a hard lesson to learn but unfortunately human beings always live in hope. We see stars not mud. We are always strong on hindsight. This time will, I'm afraid, be no different.