Google Earth for Linux

Google Earth for Linux

You will notice that, given that they make no money from these programs, they should be in the perfect position to release them as free software.

There are small mistake in this reasoning: they do make money from these programs. Both indirectly (Ads) and directly (you pay $20 to make it possible to plug GPS in your Google Earth).

And when they truly don't make any money they are perfectly happy to publish code: http://code.google.com/projects.html. Unfortunatelly that does not happen very often :-(