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I really like the idea of google open sourcing stuff but it seems like they always do it in the worst way possible.. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong projects. For example WebRTC is buried in Chromium (so is QUIC iirc) and to build either of those things it's a lot of freaking work because you have to figure out Google's build system with the documentation doing its best to prevent you from figuring it out.


That and Google is really bad at removing dead code from OSS projects. Looking through projects like Omaha is a pain.


I don't think that's true in general. Google released some widely used open-source projects like Kubernetes, Tensorflow, Android, Go, Chromonium and Angular.


Android is one of the poster childs how bad Google documentation is scattered all over Stackoverflow, Google blogs, Medium articles, outdated entries in official documentation.

Then the multiple revisions of build tools and plugins, support library releases with multiple issues on release day, breakages on Android Studio in spite of several months in beta.


AOSP in particular has very little documentation. When I was learning it the only thing I could find was a draft of an O'Reilly book. That, or reading the source code for the build system.


I'd say it's generally true with their native projects (C/C++).

With their higher level stuff, they do a lot better.


Don't forget protocol buffers !




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