Google Is Uncovering Hundreds Of Race Conditions Within The Linux Kernel

[Guest]

Could be, could be… Personally I think they are a public company, and there is no such thing as a public company that's goal is to do "good".
So often they end up doing more evil than good by accident/arrogance.

Don't think so,.. Of course, nobody, excepts Jesus, would put doing good to other before fulfilling own needs to survive. Even shoemaker makes shoes in order to get paid for them, or should shoemaker make the for free to do good? Companies are no different to shoemakers, regarding goal of their work, both company and shoemaker want to make money out of it. I wouldn't see companies, generally, that black. Every company has a responsibility to provide a stable income, and healthy working environment, for their employees. Individual people, and individual companies, might be focused only on own/personal gain without any spine and moral responsibility.

Don't generalize it, because the same could be saying, that there's no such thing as an employee, who's goal is to do "good". Goal of employees and workers is to get paid. It depends only on choice of work - to get paid for something, that provides value to others, or get paid by stealing from others (casinos,...).

[programmerjake]

Rust can eliminate whole classes of concurrency bugs at compile-time, which is part of the reason why I'm using it for most of my projects now.

[polarathene]

Rust can eliminate whole classes of concurrency bugs at compile-time, which is part of the reason why I'm using it for most of my projects now.

Rust guarantees no data races in safe code, but not race conditions.

[programmerjake]

Rust guarantees no data races in safe code, but not race conditions.

non-atomic data races is one of the classes of concurrency bugs Rust eliminates. atomic data races produce defined behavior, so don't always need to be eliminated.

[cl333r]

Well,.. depends if number of negative contributions to the world is odd or even. Negative value multiplied by negative value becomes positive value ;-)

[GI_Jack]

so is Google evil or not??

shades of grey

[kpedersen]

Every change you make to a large codebase needs to be maintained (even fixes!). Therefore it is within Google's best interest to get the open-source community to maintain Linux patches for them.
Then Google can get back to the things that are really important to them such as making the world a slightly worse place.

[Jabberwocky]

Wow, that's a narrow minded approach. Google spans multiple countries, multiple teams, with multiple targets.
So, undoubtedly there will be people that do good, and people that do evil.

TLDR; no you. Also monopolies are mostly evil.

I agree that there undoubtedly are people that do good, and people that do evil within Google or any other company of that size. The person that asked the question might be trolling, but if you take the question seriously then I don't think the question is narrow-minded. By attempting to use cognitive thinking I primarily judge companies as a whole based on their objectives and how those objectives are achieved. Since companies of their size in most cases are not honest about their objectives nor the way they achieve them unfortunately one needs to speculate. I do think that it's healthy to debate what the objectives of big monopolies are and making a conclusion based on what information you have.

I try to remain open-minded when speculating and add heavy weight to the value of hard evidence. My conclusion is that in the technical fields they are doing good, especially in open source. KCSAN and others like Summer of Code is simply amazing! In the social and law related fields they becoming evil. Google heavily discriminates in their hiring policies, if you don't drink the kool-aid then you are not allowed to work there. Google has forced arbitration in most of their contracts which is clearly abusing the workers who don't know better when they sign up (not unlawful, but evil IMO). Google through Android profits from selling personal information. For many people there isn't an alternative to Android and users are unaware of how much of their information is being sold. There are alternatives to most of their other services like maps, search, and email. I don't regard selling of personal information on services that have alternatives as evil, distasteful maybe but whatever they need to make money. The fact that Google removed "Don't be evil" from their code of conduct and motto does not bother me. I think it's quite ethical of them. Youtube hides real hyper-link addresses, similar to what scammers do. Instead of scamming Youtube "just" tracks you. Youtube does not have a fair demonetization machine learning algorithm. Instead of being honest and transparent their response is to stay quiet and try to act like they are in control of everything.

Take Microsoft adopting open source, it's great. I love it and all the advantages great things like github features, typescript, vscode, etc... Microsoft made the change due to economic reasons not philosophical reasons. I don't have time to add references, if you don't believe me that's okay take this as a hypothetical scenario. The point is what the difference in cause resembles. If Microsoft made their choice prior to the industry changing I would speculate that they are leaning towards being good. Since they changed their objectives after the industry shift that makes their move much more likely to be a wolf in sheep's clothing. Waiting to gain people's trust before changing github into linkedin 2.0 or if push comes to shove dare I say SourceForge 2.0 eek!

Conclusion: Is Google currently evil? Relative to other companies of it's size, IMHO no not even close. They are working hard at becoming (more) evil though.

[wizard69]

so is Google evil or not??

Well yes and no. Google never gets credit for the positive things they do for Linux. On the other hand they are positively evil with their data collection. One needs to give them credit for all they good things they have done for Linux while highlighting the evil.

[GreenReaper]

Google created this tool with the desire to do good. But through this, they will do more evil than we can possibly imagine...