Dive Brief:

• Google launched opensource.google.com this week, a new website that ties together all the company’s open source initiatives.

• The new site includes information on all of Google’s open source programs, organizations the company supports, and a list of open source projects Google has released. "With so many projects spread across 100 GitHub organizations and our self-hosted Git service, it can be difficult to see the scope and scale of our open source footprint," Will Norris, Open Source Programs Office, said in a blog.  

• The site also gives visitors a look at how Google performs activities around open source, such as releasing projects, as well as why the company performs certain activities the way it does.

Dive Insight:

Google formed the new site because "open source is about more than just code; it's also about community and process," Norris said. 

Enterprises are turning to open source and third-party software components to decrease the amount of code they have to write, which helps accelerate deployment cycles. And the more it is used, the more normal it has become for the development process at companies. 

An open source approach can also help solve problems a company has a hard time solving on its own. For example, Google added its E2EMail code to GitHub as part of a community-driven open source end-to-end (E2E) encryption research effort in February. E2E was supposed to make the best-known method of encryption, PGP, easier to use. But after struggling with the product for months, Google released it to an open source environment in hopes independent developers can help solve the problem.