We can't open up because we're too monolithic (Yahoo! and Google)

Tim just finished the Ghost in the Machine: The Impact of Open Source on Web 2.0 session. It's part of the Executive Briefing that I helped Tim put together (and which, btw, is completely filled - a huge success), and proved to be insightful.

One particular thing bothered me, however. I kept hearing Jeremy from Yahoo! and Chris from Google talk about how they don't open up code because "no one would understand our code, or be able to make use of it - it's too specific to a massive web company."

Oh, really? Who is to say? Shouldn't the market decide the relevance of code? Aren't Yahoo! and Google missing the point or, rather, conveniently looking past it? Open source isn't about beneficent companies giving code to the impoverished underclass. It's about working on code collaboratively within a community.

Jeremy eventually owned up to a reason that I found much more compelling - disappointing, but compelling. Jeremy said that Yahoo's applications are tightly bound together, making it difficult to open one piece without giving away information about how the remainder is written, or making it useless because knowing 1/10th of the application wouldn't be helpful (because of all the unknown code).

All of which means, as Tim pointed out, that these companies have failed to write code according to a cardinal open source principle: modularity. Yahoo! and Google can't open source more code because their code is too tightly bound together - layer upon layer upon layer requiring layer upon layer upon layer. This doesn't mean that Yahoo! and Google are bad, but it is disappointing that they are such heavy users of open source, and have architected themselves into a corner that makes giving back impossible or problematic.