Facebook has open-sourced major areas of the Facebook Platform. Why? Because developers asked them to.
In a recent announcement, the social networking company said that this is "just a first step" in a major release. Now developers or any third party can download source code, which includes "most of the code that runs Facebook Platform plus implementations of many of the most-used methods and tags."
Most of the open-source code is being made available via the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL), while the FBML parser is governed by the Mozilla Public License (MPL).
While allowing the developer community to play with and improve the code base of Facebook Platform is probably the biggest benefit for going open source, competing social Web sites can now access the code to support their own third-party application deployment.
Word in the Valley is that Facebook’s move is a reaction to Open Social, an open source platform that is supported by Google, MySpace and Yahoo. OpenSocial threatens Facebook's platform, as it has to potential to make it easier for social networking sites to match Facebook's catalog of third-party applications.
-- Michelle Savage
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment