Employees fret as Google's idealistic philosophy of transparency changes

Google's leaders have acknowledged the delicacy of adjusting a culture that has entrenched itself over two decades.

When it was founded two decades ago, Google established an unusual corporate practice. Nearly all of its internal documents were widely available for workers to review. A programmer working on Google search could for instance, dip into the software scaffolding of Google Maps to crib some elegant block of code to fix a bug or replicate a feature. Employees also had access to notes taken during brainstorming sessions, candid project evaluations, computer design documents, and strategic business plans. (The openness doesn’t apply to sensitive data such as user information.)

The idea came from open-source software development, where