Google's creed: 'Open will win'

As a year winds down in which criticism of Google was perhaps never louder, the company used a quiet preholiday afternoon to post a manifesto on what it means to be "open." Jonathan Rosenberg, senior vice president of product management, originally wrote the "The meaning of open" as a memo to employees, but posted it on Google's official blog Monday. In the essay, Rosenberg lays out Google's belief that the use of open technologies and open information are two of Google's most important core values, although reasonable people can disagree on the meaning of "open" in various contexts. "This [disagreement] is happening often enough for me to conclude that we need to lay out our definition of open in clear terms that we can all understand and support," Rosenberg wrote. "What follows is that definition based on my experiences at Google and the input of several colleagues. We run the company and make our product decisions based on these principles, so I encourage you to carefully read, review, and debate them," he told Google employees in the memo.