Facebook has announced a partnership with Box, Dropbox, GitHub, Google, Khan Academy, Stripe, Square, Twitter, and Walmart Labs to improve the way open-source projects are developed and used.
The project, dubbed TODO or “talk openly, develop openly,” provides a forum for companies that are passionate about open-source technology and can dedicate the resources to contribute to the program. The project aims to make it easier for organizations to identify — from the thousands the mature and reliable open-source projects in existence — the ones that will work at scale.
Faccebook, Google and other member companies have come to rely heavily on open-source software to run their businesses, but executives who are spearheading the projects at the respective companies believe there is room to improve how open-source is managed and organized. They admit that the program faces many challenges, but are committed to ensuring high-quality and frequent releases, engaging with developer communities, and using and contributing back to other projects effectively.
Facebook Global Head of Engineering Jay Parikh announced the program at the company’s @Scale conference in San Francisco. Sam Schillace, the head of engineering at Box, wrote in a statement on the company’s Web site that the group was committed to helping companies develop a common set of tools and streamline processes for releasing open source software.
Facebook has been a strong advocate of open software. Since the early days the site was built on PHP, MySQL and memcached. Today, most of the projects are built on GitHub, and we also actively contribute elsewhere, such as to Hadoop, LLVM, among many others.
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