So what does Google open source ?

In light of the announcement by google to develop a new Open Source browser Chrome , I could'nt help notice that all open source products from google (GWT , Android and now Chrome) are client facing and essentially fuel for making Cloud Computing a reality.

Very eloquently said by Nick - that "the weakest link in the Cloud is the browser" and taking it to the next level of serving applications only brings them closer to making Google as THE platform for SaaS development.

Note that google has not open sourced any of its server side technologies like BigTable, MapReduce etc. and I dont think they would open source them unless these become commodities (with Hadoop etc) and there is cost leverage by open sourcing them.

This also make me think - why is Sun Microsystem (NASDAQ: JAVA) open sourcing its core revenue streams(software products). If their vision is really to make money from hardware and they view software as an enabler to hardware sales - I can understand. But they are not doing a great job at hardware also.