This year has seen major moves by Google in the open source arena: The announcement of a Google operating system (Chrome OS), the release of Android 2.0 and development of Android based mobile devices by key players includng the recent release of the Motorola DROID, and just last week, Google announced the open-sourcing of Closure, one of the key components of most of it's services including Gmail, Maps and Docs. These are all throwing traditional proprietary software companies like Microsoft for a loop. As it turns out, Google is not really a software company, and these companies are trying to compete with Google using software. Talk about bringing a knife to a gunfight. Here is an except of a great article on this from CNET:

"Google and Red Hat have moved beyond software. Software enables their operations, but software doesn't define such operations. Google, for its part, is open sourcing Microsoft, one line of code at a time, and Microsoft hasn't a clue as to how to respond, because it only knows the old world: competition through better IP."

Full article here.