Google defends and promotes open systems. They bring innovation and choice to the user, and make the ecosystem of companies more competitive and dynamic. Concretely, this results in the production of over 24 million lines of code for more than 800 projects, including Android and Chrome are probably the best known. Many engineers at Google are working full time on open source projects.

While at the All Things Open conference later this year, Chris DiBona is the Director of Open Source for Google, will give an update on Google’s current open source software activities. He talked to Opensource.com on the brutal nature of open source, and Google’s responsibilities as an industry leader.

He felt that Google was (and is) still doing really interesting computer science and that appealed to him in ways that the other offers didn’t. Google considers that some projects are more important than others. Obviously, the Linux kernel is extremely important. Each time you use Google, you operate a machine running the Linux kernel. Android based devices and Chrome running on an Ubuntu/Debian derivative are most popular with a Linux kernel that most people use.

When asked about why he thinks open source is brutal, he says open source is still disparate, distributed, hon-homogenous and teams working on this environment are difficult to cope with the development.

“I think I was asked why open source works and when you think about how software engineering management works in industry, it shouldn’t. Disparate, distributed, non-homogenous teams are extremely difficult to run in a company, but in open source it creates some world-class terrific software,” DiBona said. “I think that it is because open source projects are able to only work with the productive people and ignore everyone else. That behavior can come across as very harsh or exclusionary, and that’s because it is that: brutally harsh and exclusionary of anyone who isn’t contributing.”

He says survival of the fittest as practiced in the open source world is a pretty brutal mechanism, but it works very well for producing quality software.

Android is living proof that the Open Source philosophy and Linux can succeed worldwide. Although the dumping of Linux on the desktop has never been produced, and it seems that for now will remain so, Android has complied original dream of conquering Linux users worldwide.

The kernel, compilers, GCC, Python interpreter. Python is very important part of open source. Google App Engine, for example, is neither more nor less than hosting Python system. Google spends large sums of money and time to projects such as the OSU Open Source Labs, Apache projects, EFF, creative commons and other smaller projects. Google is trying to produce their projects under the Apache License, which allows you to freely dispose of the code and change it.

Google’s commitment extends to supporting the developer community through projects such as the Google Summer of Code, which provides scholarships and mentoring students to developers so that they can carry out their projects.