Google recently announced about 12,000 layoffs, involving multiple departments and organizations, as well as various positions, including many "open source leaders" with senior experience, such as:
- Chris DiBona : Director of Open Source at Google, founded the Google Open Source Office (OSPO) 18 years ago
- Jeremy Allison : Co-Founder of Samba and Engineer at Google
- Cat Allman : Program Manager for Developer EcoSystems
- Dave Lester : new hire, responsible for Google's open source security program
Chris DiBona is 51 years old this year, and both Google Summer of Code (Google Programming Summer) and Google OSPO (Google Open Source Office) were initiated by him. The former is an online programming program for students centered around free and open source software. The latter is the first group of organizations established specifically for open source within the enterprise.
Jeremy Allison is the co-founder of the well-known open source software Samba, 61 years old this year. Samba is used to implement the SMB protocol on Linux and UNIX systems. Therefore, after knowing that he was fired by Google, Jeremy announced the news on Twitter and started "online job hunting", hoping to seek jobs that require familiarity with the SMB 1/2/3 protocol or open source experience.
Many netizens felt sorry after seeing the news of their layoffs, and at the same time, they also took the initiative to help them contact companies that are recruiting related positions.
It can be seen that these "open source giants" have been actively participating in and promoting the development of open source, and have great influence and popularity in the entire open source field, and many people are happy to work with them.
They weren't laid off because Google didn't need open source experts. After all, Google was built on open source software, and it lives and dies on open source software. Nor can it be because Google wants to focus its efforts on AI to meet the challenge posed by ChatGPT. Since the most popular AI/ML frameworks like PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Rasa are open source projects, now is not the time to let some of the best and brightest open source experts go.
Therefore, the foreign technology media The Register bluntly stated that people with normal minds would not make the decision to lay them off.