Google open source guru Chris DiBona says that the web giant continues to ban the lightning-rod AGPL open source license within the company because doing so "saves engineering time" and because most AGPL projects are of no use to the company.

"I received an email this morning from a friend who is planning to put his open source project in Google Code, the open source repository hosted by Google..."

"We moved the code repository of Clipperz’s open source projects from Google Code to SourceForge, because Google doesn’t like AGPL and is kindly requesting all developers that opted for this license to leave..."

"...After months of hard work, AGPL v3 has been finalized by the Free Software Foundation. [...] Funambol is obviously the first commercial open source company to embrace AGPL v3. I am happy to announce that our upcoming GA release of Funambol 6.5 will be based on AGPL v3. I believe AGPL will save open source..."

Few people in the open source community have touched as many projects as Leslie Hawthorn, the now-former open source program manager for Google. As one of less than ten employees in Google's open source programs office, Hawthorn was at the center of the Google Summer of Code — a project that has worked with hundreds of projects and thousands of college students since its inception in 2005.

Following on from the success of the Google Summer of Code program, Google is pleased to announce this new effort to get young people involved in open source development. We've teamed up with the open source projects listed here to give student contestants the opportunity to learn more about and contribute to all aspects of open source software development

According to data presented by DiBona, Google's Open Source programs manager, the GPLv3 license now represents more than half of the GPL licensed code that Google hosts on its Google Code site. What DiBona's data shows is that developers are embracing GPLv3 and using it for their project in growing numbers.

Very little is done quietly in a giant multi-national corporation. Exceptionally high-profile firms like Google undergo even more scrutiny, making it somewhat unusual to discover they've been developing numerous projects — in the open, and Open Source-licensed — that are all but unknown. As odd as it may be, that is exactly the case at Google.

There has been a sea change in public opinion. Google is now seen as the evil empire. Microsoft, they’re the feisty little guys up in Washington state. The change has also been marked by a new attitude toward open source. Google’s delivery of open source code for Living Stories is treated as ho-hum. The donation of $2 million to Wikimedia is quickly followed by snark.