[conspire] All you need to know about Google software development

[Rick Moen]

   Google is forking existing FOSS code bits for Chromium like a rabbit
   makes babies: frequently, and usually, without much thought.  Rather 
   than leverage the existing APIs from upstream projects like icu, 
   libjingle, and sqlite (just to name a few), they simply fork a point 
   in time of that code and hack their API to shreds for Chromium to use. 
   This is akin to much of the Java methodology, which I can sum up as 
   "I'd like to use this third-party code, but my application is too 
   special to use it as is, so I covered it with Bedazzler Jewels and 
   Neon Underlighting, then bury my blinged out copy in my application.". 
   A fair amount of the upstream Chromium devs seem to have Java 
   backgrounds, which may explain this behavior, but it does not excuse it.

http://spot.livejournal.com/312320.html

(See also:  Android, ChromeOS, Chrome.)


Author Tom 'spot' Callaway of Fedora/RH seems to be a veritable font of
sanity, and also has good taste in reading material.  I.e., the Fedora
update he recently filed to record an utterly inscrutable Qlogic binary
firmware blob along with his homage to Charles Stross in the comments.

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F14/FEDORA-2011-12302

(Reading material:  http://www.goldengryphon.com/Stross-Concrete.html)