Today Google announced their Summer of Code initiative, which seems like a nice gesture toward aspiring programmers to bring them into the world of open source. But I suspect it’s a lot more than PR. This actually feels like a strategic move against Microsoft. Let me explain.
In spite of their reputation as the “evil empire,” Microsoft has always been incredibly generous to programmers. They give away tons of free stuff, host frequent seminars about their technology, and sponsor every other tech event in the world. As a result, Microsoft has a well-deserved good reputation among corporate developers for giving them all the tools they need to be successful.
By contrast, Apple for many years had a terrible reputation with developers. They were stingy about giving out information and had the awful habit of competing with many of their best ISVs. Yes, Apple has great technology, but are they a good partner? Many developers said “no thanks.” (To be fair, Microsoft sometimes competes with its ISVs, but more frequently, if a product is strategic, Microsoft just buys the company outright. That’s one of the advantages of having $50 billion in the bank)
In the meantime, Linux and other open source projects came along. Scads of them. So now an aspiring programmer has access to tons of free tools and the chance to meaningfully contribute to a product’s evolution. And they don’t have to worry about Steve Jobs deciding to run them out of the market. And in the last two years, most of their programs will even run on a Mac (which uses Unix under the covers), so they get the best of both worlds.
Google is probably the hottest tech company in the world right now, the company everyone wants to work for. They obviously can’t hire everyone, but they can reach out to them and make them feel apart of the Google zeitgeist. And give them lots of free stuff in the form of open source software (which is already free anyway) and, perhaps more important, access to their APIs, which sparks all kinds of way-cool innovations. The cost to them is small (Google promises $4,500 per developer), but the long term payoff (more developers who prefer the emerging Google platform) is potentially worth billions. And it’s one more headache for Microsoft.