Read "The Meaning of Open" by Jonathan Rosenberg, senior vice president of product management, because it's a great read, but read it knowing a few things.

First, Google open sources a lot of software, in fact Rosenberg claims Google is the largest open source contributor in the world, contributing over 800 projects that total over 20 million lines of code to open source.

Google has ceded code to Apache for its Android mobile operating system (though some say Google isn't as open as it could be here), Chrome Web browser, Chrome Operating system, Google Wave, Google Gears and a raft of other technologies.

Many of us who work in high-tech have family that we consider so-called civilians.

Civilians to us are those computer users who are not only non-geeks, but are so far out of the loop on high-tech mechanics that they use Microsoft Word, but don't know enough to call it a word processing application. They just know that it lets them write things.

Google, exasperated by the number of people who don't seem to know what a Web browser is (see this Google-conducted interview from New York City), today launched this WhatBrowser.org Website, which defines what a Web browser is and lets users download the applications that let us surf the Web.

Recently I received a copy of "Inside Larry and Sergey's Brain" by Richard Brandt, a former BusinessWeek reporter. It was published Sept. 17: