Google: giving away software for free?
After the famous Google Summer of Codeâ„¢, bringing together hundreds of students and mentors across 90 countries to develop a variety of open source software, today Google released the Google Web Toolkit as free software.
Google Web Toolkit is likely to be used by competitors, as observed today but I think they had a very good reason to make it open.
if Google’s ultimate goal is to be more competitive with Microsoft on several fronts, the company has a long way to go. Google had nearly 5,700 employees at the end of last year, up from about 3,000 at the end of 2004. Microsoft has about 61,000 workers worldwide.Google is still small compared to Microsoft in terms of employees and facilities, and expanding is not cheap.
said Chris Sherman, executive editor of SearchEngineWatch.com.
So, are they trying to save money for hiring (already) skilled developers?
Roberto Galoppini and 
Simo are discussing.
Simo 5:28 pm on December 13, 2006 Permalink
I wonder why they choose the Apache License instead of something that would protect more their assets like the LGPL.
Roberto Galoppini 5:43 pm on December 13, 2006 Permalink
May be Google is willing to get it under the Apache umbrella?