What is this open web thinggie with applications behind closed doors that I never get to see?
Google is just yet another big corporation that no longer needs to pretend to be the open source champion.
Likewise Apple is no different from the good old days of Mac OS. The openness that started with NeXT acquisition is long gone.
Open is only good as long as it sells, there is never the idea of making a better world for consumers just because it feels right or something like that.
I'm surprised by this comment. Google is still very supportive of open source, I don't think there is any comparison with other big tech companies. It's not just the still growing Google Summer of Code and Code-in programs[1], but the scope and number of open source projects that they publish and maintain: Android, Chrome OS, Chromium, V8, Go, Dart, Angle, Angular, PDFium, Guava, GWT, WebM...
By the way, I think the impact of Android (the open source project) is underestimated. There is a huge number of research and industry projects that are based on the open platform, not just phone and tablet apps but all kind of hardware projects.[2]
So when I read a casual dismissal of these efforts (by knowledgeable people like you) I feel bad for the engineers and managers that work to promote open source inside the company.
On the other hand, Google is the biggest force behind the shift to the Cloud, and that shift means more and more users using closed-source web apps like Google Docs instead of open source applications like LibreOffice, so there is that...
I was being a bit stronger to make a point about corporations and their relationship with open source.
There was a time I was one of such engineers that you mention, but eventually came to realize how company boards see open source and how little we could get in return.
Google is just yet another big corporation that no longer needs to pretend to be the open source champion.
Likewise Apple is no different from the good old days of Mac OS. The openness that started with NeXT acquisition is long gone.
Open is only good as long as it sells, there is never the idea of making a better world for consumers just because it feels right or something like that.