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Interview With Facebook's Head of Open Source

Posted by timothy on from the complete-transparency dept.

Czech37 writes Facebook may be among the world's most well-known tech companies, but it's not renowned for being at the forefront of open source. In reality, they have over 200 open source projects on GitHub and they've recently partnered with Google, Dropbox, and Twitter (among others) to create the TODO group, an organization committed to furthering the open source cause. In an interview with Opensource.com, Facebook's James Pearce talks about the progress the company has made in rebooting their open source approach and what's on the horizon for the social media network.

5 of 29 comments (clear)

  1. I wouldn't cite those projects if I were you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    90% of them are specific to Facebook with no particular applications for anyone who doesn't have a massive server farm.

    1. Re:I wouldn't cite those projects if I were you by the_B0fh · · Score: 2

      Speak for yourself. Some of these are of interest to me and my company.

    2. Re:I wouldn't cite those projects if I were you by Agrippa · · Score: 4, Interesting

      While I would agree with the OP that a lot of these projects target the needs of large, FB-like companies, Reactjs and Flux (Flux is a pseudo-framework for React) are really nice alternatives to heavier options like Angular and Backbone. If you're building with JS on the front end then definitely take a look; the speed advantage over Angular is ridiculous.

  2. Re:PR Stunt by SourceFrog · · Score: 3, Interesting

    In some ways, it's worse than just a PR stunt, because patents effectively neutralize many of the benefits of open source - this effectively allows these companies like Google andF B to recruit developers to fix their bugs for free, while they make billions from the improved software - because they know the fact that it's open source doesn't matter when the big software 'parent cartels' own all the patents and cross-license, ring-fence and regulate to keep real competition out the market anyway. The serfs work for free while the lords live the high life.

    Abolishing software patents would do more to benefit the software industry (and everyone on earth) than making every last piece of code open source.

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  3. "talk openly, develop openly" by SourceFrog · · Score: 2

    The TODO group's motto. If the members of this group really cared about "talk openly, develop openly", they would release all their collectively owned software patents into the public domain. Until then, open source means 'you fix bugs for us, we still own the patents on the final product'.

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    My other UID is three digits.