i don’t want to offend anyone, but some open source/privacy enthusiasts dislike google, but why?? google has made chromium, android, etc and most of the things they do are open source, and not only that, they also support creative commons media or public domain. i know the privacy concernes they may have, but they would never do anything bad to you. i love google personally because of their commitment to open source software.
Personally Google gives me a negative impression due to its intrusiveness and current aim of hoovering up all data possible. While you seem certain Google would never hurt you, there are many people who would never take such a risk. Even if Google was purely good of heart (which I doubt), they have proven themselves subjects to Government whims. A recent example is here: https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/18/google_keyword_search_warrants/ where a court in the United States ordered Google to return personally identifying information on any and all users who searched for the address of a crime in the month prior. And their commitment to open source is debatable as shown by their graveyard of projects (https://killedbygoogle.com/) often killed with strong usage and with dubious explanations really has strong Embrace, Extend, Extinguish vibes.
i know those criticisms. but while they do end the life of some services, they mostly do it to merge other services or make them better. and by the way, their main open source projects haven’t been ended, so that means something.
There are some, myself included, who believe many of the “mainstream” projects are only open to avoid antitrust lawsuits in America. The reason why there is chromium vs chrome and AOSP Android vs Google Android, is to take advantage of the confusion to make it sound as if the actual Google product is open source, where as the Google product is based upon the open source project. This makes it sound like anybody could copy Google’s product and give them a run for their money, which is obviously not the case.