Does the research get published or otherwise make it outside of the Googleplex? Serious question.
"Hadoop was derived from Google's MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers."
So apparently the disclosure was good enough to give you that :)
http://www.slideshare.net/jbellis/cassandra-open-source-bigt...
Shows that cassandra is based on the bigtable paper, among others (hbase i believe was as well).
Their disclosure is apparently good enough to get folks going ...
FWIW: In reading 20 years of compiler papers, i've had more luck getting code for papers from commercial companies than academics. It's become somewhat better over time, but plenty of universities still seem completely unwilling to give code to papers.
Am I defending academics who can't or won't turn over all their data? No, of course not, but most of them don't try to pretend you can do science and still be proprietary.
P.S. I'm not talking about all companies. Intel and MSR turn over a bunch of stuff. I'm talking specifically about Google.
I recently went looking for any code published by Hinton, since I've been doing some neural network research as a hobby, but was unable to find any at all.
This tends to result in very poor code, since the people who write it do not practice their craft. And very poor code isn't usually released because people are embarrassed.
I'm certainly generalizing here, but this seems to be the trend as I see it. It is a sorry state of affairs, and I try to do my best to encourage publishing code with the people I work with. (Code reviews are great.)
It seems from my experience that generally Hinton and team seem very open to sharing quite abit of their code, data and results.
For reference, I googled "research at google".
