Maybe I'm just cynical, but...

Through Dare Obasanjo's blog, I was pointed to a 'conversation' between Adam Bosworth of Google and Krzysztof Kowalczyk about the open source contributions.  It all started when Adam 'asked' the open source community to fix a problem with commercial databases for those customers who need to maintain high availability and scalability across large clusters.  Krzysztof (and others) suggested that Adam was trying to get the open source community to play tooth fairy. 

Although at first blush, it certainly sounds like having the suggestion implemented would greatly ease Google's ongoing operational effort, in a follow-up post Adam says that he wasn't asking for Google, that Google already has what it needs for storage and indexing. He then goes on to scold the critics of his posts, saying that they don't appreciate what Google gives our for free millions of times a day.

I have two issues with Adam's comments.  First, if Google has already solved this problem, why have no contributions to the open source community along this effort been forthcoming.  While it might not have addressed the dynamic partitioning and schema changes (it's possible), odds are pretty good that Google has an idea about indexing.  They would certainly be able to kick start the effort by making a contribution in those areas.

My second issue is the dis-ingenuousness of the “we're giving stuff away for free” comment.  Google has a market cap of $53B.  Revenues are approaching $3B per year.  Some of that revenue comes from sponsored searches, AdWords, AdSense and a number of other products that need the traffic generated by their free service.  Which is to say that if Google stopped giving stuff away, their revenues would fall off pretty quickly.

Do I love what Google offers?  Of course. Makes my life much easier in many different ways.  But please don't pretend that it's being given away for altruistic reasons.  I'm really not that naive.