fbOpen: Facebook Going Open Source
Date : 2008 06 03 Category : Tech & Development ProgrammableWeb
The Facebook platform team celebrated the platform’s one year anniversary with another big move: going open source. As announced on their developer blog they are releasing portions of their platform as open source:
Last week, we at Facebook celebrated the one-year anniversary of our f8 conference, where Facebook Platform was launched. It’s been quite a year, with over 24,000 applications built on the platform and over 400,000 developers building new social experiences. We see about 140 applications added to our directory per day, and nearly all of our users have added at least one application.
As a starting point, we’re open-sourcing a significant part of Facebook Platform, including most of the code that runs Facebook Platform plus implementations of many of the most-used methods and tags. This release is just a first step in providing you a look into Facebook Platform.
You can download the code here: developers.facebook.com/fbopen/.
And from a licensing perspective, they’ve chosen to use a combination of the CPAL and MPL licensing models:
Most of this release is licensed under the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL). The CPAL is community-friendly and reflects how software works today by recognizing web services as a major way of distributing software. It also enables you to connect your brand to ours as you make modifications and updates. The rest of the code is licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL).
It has been quite a year for the platform. The impact of this launch shook the social networking space and essentially forced all competitors to offer APIs and platforms of their own. Or as Google has done, they created not only a new open standard, OpenSocial, but an open source implementation, Shindig.