Google does Linux Videos

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Google famously maintains the largest farm of Linux servers on Earth. (Ten thousand? Thirty thousand? A million? I've heard all those numbers.) Perhaps less famously, it also contributes substantially to many open source communities and advocacy organizations (e.g. Free Software Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Python Software foundations, OSDL). In 2005 Google's Summer of Code matched students and mentors around the world to drive participation in dozens of open source projects. The company has also donated $350,000 Oregon State University and Portland State University for a joint open source technology initiative.

On the other hand, the company has also taken some heat from members of the Linux community (yours truly included) for releasing new software on Windows alone, or just on Windows and Macintosh, before getting around to Linux clients.

Well, that changed with the new Google Video service. When it was launched as a beta service last Fall, Google Video came with uploaders for all three platforms.

Google Video's upload page also says "we prefer that you encode your video files using mpeg-2 or mpeg-4 codecs with mp3 audio". Though they don't give the reasons, they highly discourage the familiar proprietary formats: QuickTime, RealVideo and Windows Media.

Unlike Google's familiar search service, Google Video is essentially a giant server farm for anybody's video uploads. Google also provides a mechanism for selling your videos, if you like. Charge any price you like, including zero. The copyright is also all yours.

At this writing (not long after the service went live) there are 34 Linux-related videos on the service. Let's see how high we can make that number.

- Doc Searls