Actually, this is exactly what "open" means. Google's main competitors are Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple.<p>Facebook has a good track record of contributing open source projects, (Cassandra, for example), but an arguably poor track record on openness of user data (see Vine).<p>Apple is tied with Microsoft for the least open company on this list. While they have a few great open source projects (like clang and webkit) iOS is a completely closed system, and their devices are closed hardware.<p>Amazon is a very open company, allowing other people to use components of its stack and hardware.<p>Microsoft is a patent bully, and windows phone/RT is just as closed as iOS.<p>Google, by comparison, open sources tons of software, from internal libraries (Guava, Guice, Gson) to entire platforms (Android, ChromeOS, Chromium). They also open protocols and standards such as VP8 and SPDY. They publish papers in conferences and give talks on how their company operates.<p>Google certainly isn't as open as it could be, but saying that "Open has very little to do with anything Google does" is clearly false.