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Your Google Mashups Code Is Public  (View post)

James Xuan [PersonRank 10]

Friday, August 31, 2007
16 years ago4,132 views

Privacy issues again

Marcin Sochacki (Wanted) [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Broken link to the Mashup Editor.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Thanks Marcin, fixed!

Marcin Sochacki (Wanted) [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

It looks to me as a feature not a bug.

After all this is an early beta and one cool way to learn is to look at others' source code.

See e.g. these posts:
http://googlemashupeditor.blogspot.com/2007/07/gme-development-resources.html
http://googlemashupeditor.blogspot.com/2007/07/editing-your-mashup-without-google.html

They should add a more visible note about it in the main FAQ, though.

TOMHTML [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

"Uses

   * Information you post on a Google Mashup Editor site may be read, copied, used and redistributed by people you do not know. Use care when posting personal information on any site and do not include sensitive information, such as social security numbers, financial information or home addresses or phone numbers.
"
They can't say that they forgot to warn us about that... :-/

http://code.google.com/gme/privacy.html

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

You should look at other people's code only if they make the project public. This is certainly a bug.

Sam [PersonRank 3]

16 years ago #

1. All code on Google Code is public
2. All Google Mashup Code is host on Google Code
3. Therefore, Google Mashup Code is public.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

No Tom, read on – from the same page, they're talking about published projects apparently:

<<Your choices

   * You may stop your Google Mashup Editor site from being available through Google. To do so, go to the Google Mashup Editor home page, click the “Published Apps” tab, select the mashup you wish to remove, and click “Unpublish.”>>

As I mentioned, my code was published even though it wasn't in the published apps tab.

Paul McDonald [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

On behalf of the GME team I apologize for the lack of clarity around this issue. We have since added a FAQ (http://code.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=75504&topic=11653) and will be updating our documentation to be more clear about how we store source code and resources.

All source code and uploaded resource files are stored using the open source project hosting feature of Google Code. We do this for a couple of reasons.

1) We want to take advantage of the infrastructure built and maintained by the excellent engineers in charge of Google Code.

2) We feel open source software is really important to our community of developers and we want to foster that community with tools and features in our products.

3) Its really important to us that developers learn from each other. In order for us to help our developers learn from each other we thought it was important that they can see how others have done something, just like you can do today with HTML pages in a browser. So we include a link to the source of every GME app in the login bar of that mashup.

We hope developers see the value in open sourcing their code and making it available to the world. Of course we are open to feedback and look forward to hearing from you.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Paul, the problem is not making it open source once the user hits "publish". The problem is making it public before the user published it... just after they hit "save"! There's not a lot to learn from files that are just saved anyway, because they may be in any stage of development, and not ready yet for anyone else to see. Also, the same interface metaphors in Google Docs, for instance – save vs publish – mean a vastly different thing. In Google Docs, just as you expect it, saving means just saving and publishing means really publishing.

Indeed, you might say that "not publishing" something by the definition of the word should mean it's "not public". Yet, in Google Mashups Editor, unpublished equals public! That is the issue, not the cool general open source approach.

stefan2904 [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

mh, I noticed that.

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