Russ, if this is what the talk was answering, is that really the question? I think the simpler answer to the grandparent post is: yes.
The closing keynote to the second GoLang conference, where all the keynotes were Google employees?
Asking about Go's reliance on Google deserves a better answer than your Groups thread, or this HN post. I love your writing in the post you linked, but a technical response on process still doesn't say anything about Google The Corporation's influence. Would you try again?
The Go team had nothing to do with the organization of the conference. The gophercon organizers decided who got the keynotes.
From an external viewpoint, Google the corporation has two influences. Firstly, it employs the language leaders (i.e. Russ). Secondly, Google frequently hires/gives to the Go team experts in some particular field in order to improve the implementation. For example transforming GC for the 1.5 release or moving to SSA for 1.6. As a result, Google probably has a big influence on what the important tasks are to work on. That said, it is still open source, and so outside contributors can still work on what they consider important. For example, the shared library development was all external.
OK, let me try again. I read that post as asking about whether Rob's talk helped make proposals from outside Google more successful, not about Google's influence vs others.
I directly addressed Google's influence in my opening keynote; the text is at blog.golang.org/open-source. But I'll try to answer that interpretation of the question below too:
> Why is there a massive skew favoring Googlers having their proposals implemented compared to plebes?
> Did the stats change after rob's talk in 2012?
One reason is that Google pays for the bulk of the Go development, especially development that needs design (for example, the new garbage collector, or core language changes). This is changing slowly: we are seeing other companies begin to pay for Go development that makes Go better in some way for them. Canonical is paying people to add support for shared libraries, which matters for Linux distributions like Ubuntu. Intel is paying people to make Go take more advantage of Intel features; Oracle is paying someone to port Go to SPARC 64. I mentioned this in my keynote.
Another reason is that we weren't clear about the vision for Go. Rob's talk in 2012 was the first crisp statement of that vision. I hope to have elaborated a bit in my keynote. We're still trying to articulate that clearly. I do believe that non-Google proposals have been more in keeping with Go since then, but I don't have data. That talk was an important step by itself, but certainly not a sufficient one.
We believe a significant reason is that we have never properly explained what makes a complete proposal. If you look at golang.org/doc/contribute.html, it is very clear about how to send code but contains almost no text about how to send a proposal or design. We believe that being clearer about what makes a complete proposal and what makes a complete design doc will help non-Googler contributors be more successful at those. Of course, we will have to wait and see what the actual effect is.
This was the point of Andrew's talk: to recap the history of how changes to Go have been proposed and made, and to admit that we realize we haven't been doing a good job at supporting non-Google proposals and are trying to address that, both by being clearer about what a successful proposal look like and by establishing a timely process for answering them and an historical record.
The focus here is the _success_ rate of non-Google proposals. The balance of Google vs non-Google proposals, which you seem to be asking about, depends mainly on how much development is being funded by non-Google companies or individuals. Having a clear process may help increase that, but it would be a secondary effect.
The closing keynote to the second GoLang conference, where all the keynotes were Google employees?
Asking about Go's reliance on Google deserves a better answer than your Groups thread, or this HN post. I love your writing in the post you linked, but a technical response on process still doesn't say anything about Google The Corporation's influence. Would you try again?