Google has made impressive inroads against cloud leader AWS by aggressively open sourcing projects such as TensorFlow and Kubernetes. It’s true AWS makes more money than Google (or anyone else) by operationalizing this open source code...

Now the company has laid off some of its best and brightest in open source. People like its longtime open source chief Chris DiBona. Or Jeremy Allison, Cat Allman, and Dave Lester.

Chris DiBona, for example, established Google’s Open Source Programs Office (OSPO) 18 years ago. Though DiBona isn’t the sort of person to take credit for the open source work Google has done over the years (hugely impressive in quantity and quality), he’s arguably done more than any other Googler to lay the groundwork for Google’s open source contributions.

Allman helped run Google’s wildly successful Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for many years. One person who directly benefited from GSoC commented, “Your work at Google has created massive positive impact on thousands of people around the world through GSoC, particularly in the developing nations. I was one of those kids at some point.”

And so on. It seems as if several members of Google’s Open Source Programs Office were let go. It also seems like no one counted the cost of saving those pennies.

Maybe the thinking behind the layoffs is that, now that open source contribution has become standard operating procedure at Google, there’s little ongoing need for the influence of Googlers like DiBona. But this ignores the fact that he and the others who were let go have done the behind-the-scenes architecting, strategizing, lobbying, and executing to make open source essential to how Google functions today. You don’t lay off that much experience without repercussions.

Open source has been essential to Google’s strong showing in the cloud wars. To keep that momentum going, Google needs more open source expertise, not less. Yes, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is scraping by on a mere $46.34 billion in profit last quarter. But if the company hopes to continue to use open source as a tailwind, it should reevaluate how it’s scoring its open source talent, and it should remember that it ends up saving far more than it spends with effective open source policies.