The technology giant Google has not only use numerous open-source software on its own products and services, but also contribute to the community by delivering its own for people to use on their own project.
On March 29th, 2017, Google is launching a new website that aims to bring all of the company's open-source projects into one place. What this means, the website includes information about its Guetzli JPEG encoder that promises a reduced image size to up to 25 percent, TensorFlow, Roboto and Noto, Dart programming language and more.
By launching a website to showcase all of the company's effort in the open-source community, Google is putting everything it has on open-source under one umbrella. The website includes a directory of projects that the company has made available to the community, a list of initiatives it runs to engage with programmers, as well as documentation explaining how Google uses, contributes to and releases open-source code, so other people can follow.
While the website is up and running, Google will still make the peojects available on GitHub and also on Google's self-hosted git service. The website is just meant to be the central directory for all of them.
While the website focuses on showcasing Google's projects, the company said that it also wants to use the website to provide people "a look under the hood" on how it "does" open source.
To do this, Google is also publishing a number of its documents about how it does open source internally.
"Our policies and procedures are informed by many years of experience and lessons we’ve learned along the way," said Google on its announcement. "We know that our particular approach to open source might not be right for everyone - there's more than one way to do open source - and so these docs should not be read as a 'how-to' guide."
The documents include topics that cover information about Google's release processes for new projects, as well as how to submit patches and describing how the company handles third-party open-source projects internally.
Google in launching the website, is highlighting the importance of open-source projects to technology giants. Some of the top tech companies that are also active in the community include the likes of Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter.