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Some of Google’s past hires involve people who are pretty well known in the open source and open standards worlds.
Last week, Kevin Marks noted on his blog that he had recently become Begoogled, and is now a software engineer at Google. He was a principal engineer for Technorati, after working for Apple and the BBC. He is a founding member of Microformats and the Social Software Alliance.
Google is known for heralding open source software development, and using open source software. There’s a nice interview with Google’s open-source programs manager, Chris DiBona, from last December: Newsmaker: A look inside Google’s open-source kitchen
I thought it would be fun to find some of the other folks who have worked on open source or open standards projects before joining Google. By no means is this list complete. I suspect that I’m just scratching the surface.
* Sean Egan
Google’s Got GAIM
October 2005
- Gaim
* Joshua Bloch (video) –
July 2004
-Java
* Guido van Rossum
Google gives a Xmas present to Python lovers
– Python
* Bram Moolenaar
– Vim
* Rob Pike
His Google Labs Page
- Limbo
* Andrew Morton
August 2006
Morton Gets Googled
- Linux Kernel
* David Hanson
December, 2004
- LCC (“Local C Compiler” or “Little C Compiler”)
* Ben Collins-Sussman
- Subversion
* Brian W. Fitzpatrick
- Subversion
- cvs2svn
[...] Those were 2-3 semi-negative posts that I wanted to give a quick take on. Just so that people don’t get down thinking that every post is negative about Google, here’s a really interesting post by Bill Slawski of SEO by the SEA. Bill pulls together mentions of twelve different Googlers who have made nice contributions to Open Source or open standards. I know of several other Googlers who help open-source projects and who aren’t on that list; it’s good to be reminded that Google contributes to the open source movement in a lot of ways. [...]
A couple more off the top of my head: Ben Goodger, a major Firefox developer; and Ian Hickson, the author of the WHATWG specs.
Thanks, Rory.
A couple of links to go with them:
Ian Hickson, who worked on Opera, tells us that he is now working on The Web Hypertext Application Technology
Ben Goodger has worked on Mozilla and Firefox.
Hmmm. Sorry but I am going to have to go ahead and agree with Matt on this one. I think that we should be truly in favor of Google here and make sure that we take it’s gifts with a big smile and a bribe to keep on doing the good that they do. Google has definitely been kind to the open source lovers out here on the web and those of us stuck in little tiny rooms behind computer screens all day really appreciate the tools that Google provides and the support they give to us. They tend to make my job a heck of a lot easier a lot of the time. I liked your list of all of the people who have become BeGoogled in the past several years…especially because I liked seeing where they were coming from. It’s incredible that several people came over from subversion all around the same time. Kinda makes me wonder what happened over there since my work just started using subversion. It’s not one of those places where mass exodus happens often is it?
The subversion point is interesting.
I’d venture a guess that people interested enough in putting together something like subversion would be interested in building other tools that benefit programmers, and make their jobs easier. Attracting a crowd like that isn’t a bad idea at all.