That just seems like bad design on their part. In the past, Google leaned towards open source by default, and then kept just some of the secret sauce to their services proprietary, now it seems that their proprietary services is the bulk of what they produce.
Perhaps they need to unbundle.
Google Wave works great today on self-hosted platforms.
Google Wave was still useful after it was open sourced because people could set up their own servers.
But what would you take from Google Wallet? The physical debit card? The payment service? Unless you're opening a bank, I'm not sure how useful any of that would be.
All codebases are horrible after some years- that is the result of "please invest not time into this done project"- hotbugfixes piling to spots where they don't belong.
The existence of this architecture corrosion is not something to be ashamed off.
And everyone who reads in, can do so while refactoring those "if (input(isExoticEdgeCase)){...}" into some Filterclass of there own.
My assumption is, that often management is in fear of being proven wrong, by some project coming alive.
"This Project is not profitable, lets open source it." is a statement that can haunt you, if that very project comes alive and walks the earth for years to come.
Coders and management united in fear of public embarrassment.
