[Foundation-l] In defence of Google

[Gerard Meijssen]

Anthony schreef:
> On 1/20/07, Peter van Londen <londenp at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> GerardM is not alone.
>>
>> I do agree, with Gerards view.
>> Why this hostility to commerce, I don't understand?
>> Let's use them for our purposes in stead of renounce them!
>>
>>     
> If you know anything about me you'd know I'm not at all hostile to
> commerce.  There's nothing at all wrong with commerce.  I just don't
> think commerce is something to be praised.
>
> I also think it's a joke to say that Google is a proponent of open
> content.  Google Video: DRM.  Google Book Search: DRM.  The list of
> Google's adoption of policies which go completely against open content
> goes on and on.  Maybe they donate to some open source projects.  In
> fact, if you want to say that "Google did a world of good to the Open"
> SOURCE movement, I won't object.  But the original statement that
> touched off my objection was talking about Open Content, not Open
> Source.
>
> Anthony
Hoi,
Commerce is an abstraction. Google a reality. The traffic that we have 
and the resulting relevance that we acquired as a result is largely due 
to Google. This is a reality. As I said earlier, it is relevant to 
appreciate our friends. Microsoft's search engine does not do us any 
favours. This is a reality. Our aims are in bringing information to 
people; that is what Google helps us do. If we had twice the amount of 
content and we did not have the traffic that comes from Google we would 
not be half as good in achieving our goal. Our goal is to get the 
information out, it is not sitting on it and think ourselves great for 
having created such a large body of work.

Google does not need to be actively creating Open Content to be 
considered beneficial to the Open Content. As they gave us a fair 
ranking in their search engine we thrived. With your dismissal of Google 
Books you conveniently ignore the controversy that exists because of the 
audacity that Google had in making this tool available. You conveniently 
ignore that many publishers went to court in order to prevent this 
service in the first place. If anything, Google should be applauded for 
services like Google book search, Google scholar. Writers and publishers 
have praised Google because their offerings can now be found and have a 
second lease of commercial life. It is exactly a service like Google 
book search that prevents the monopolistic content of most of the book 
shops to dominate even more. It may be an inconvenient truth, but Google 
does good where it matters. What matters is that information becomes 
available to people and it is not just the Open Content project and 
communities that have a patent on this.

I will confess, I am not really interested in video, but I would not be 
surprised if it turns out that you are wrong on that as well.

So please repeat after me, Google did and does well for us. Google is 
our friend.

Thanks,
    GerardM

PS .. well do not bother.. just trying to be funny.