Chris DiBona talks Google

DiBona has a good handle on interviews. As he demonstrates below, it pays to choose your words carefully as they can otherwise be misconstrued. Regardless, he did make it clear that Google is pretty sweet on the BSD license.

In issue 77 of Linux Format, on the shelves now, we have an interview with Chris DiBona - former Slashdot editor, developer, OSS consultant and now Google’s open source program manager. Here are a few of the questions we asked Chris, along with his answers:

LXF: In what ways would you say that Google is sponsoring open source?

CD: Actually I don’t like the word ‘sponsoring’. I don’t like sponsoring, I don’t like ‘subsidising’, I don’t like ‘giving back’. The words I like are ‘working with’ them. We see them as our peers in computer science, we don’t see them as people who need sponsoring, frankly. The funny thing about open source is that over the last five years, a lot of these organisations that you and I consider prominent have got a ton of support – financial, operational through things like Tigris, SourceForge. They don’t need sponsorship, what they need is more people developing code. [Read the rest]

[tags]google,chris dibona,bsd,interview,linux format[/tags]