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Have spare time, dev skills? See what open-source projects need your help with this flowchart

Jolie O'Dell — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 19:40:45 +0000

Hey devs! If you’ve got decent coding skills and a desire to give back to the community, we’ve found an interactive flowchart that’ll show you some of the ways you can contribute your time to Mozilla projects.

Called What Can I Do For Mozilla, the site lets you choose from a few web languages — JavaScript, C, Java, PHP, and Python, to name a few — then directs you to the Mozilla projects needing contributors with those skills.

Most languages have multiple related projects for would-be contributors to consider, and each end option links to the project page.

Check ‘er out:

Basically, we all know that open-source software is a good thing, and we all know that good people give back to the communities from which they themselves take inspiration and tools. This site just makes it really easy to start following through on those values.

The site was created by University of Waterloo computer science student Josh Matthews. Matthews himself has contributed to a fair number of open-source projects, from Greasemonkey scripts and C IDEs to Firefox mods and JRuby.

Image credit: Shutterstock

Filed under: Dev

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Microsoft open-sources Kinect code

Jolie O'Dell — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 22:05:40 +0000

Microsoft has open-sourced some of the code for Kinect for Windows, its motion-sensing gestural control device for the desktop.

A total of 22 code samples have been posted to CodePlex, aka “Not GitHub.” Baby steps, baby steps!

Samples are available in C++, VisualBasic, and C# and include such elements as face tracking, depth of field, and audio capture/speech controls. Interested developers will need to download VisualStudio, .NET, and the Kinect for Windows SDK before getting started.

As Microsoftie Ben Lower wrote on the company blog, the whole goal of open-sourcing some of its most interesting technology is for the company to get feedback and rapidly improve on a game-changing device and accompanying software.

All the code samples are released under an Apache 2.0 license and are free for you to take, reuse, or remix. “Also, we’re using a Git repository so it’s easy clone & fork if you want,” Lower said.

In its preparation for Kinect-controlled Windows apps, Microsoft also recently released guidelines for gestural controls — a sort of white paper for app makers who are doing gestures for the first time and need standards, guidance, and expectations for users’ needs and wants.

Filed under: Dev

Hiring managers: “A good Linux-head is hard to find”

Jolie O'Dell — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 12:00:47 +0000

A new report shows Linux experience is in greater demand — and, hiring managers say, harder to find — than in past years.

The 2013 Linux Jobs Report, released today by the Linux Foundation, surveyed 850 hiring managers and 2,600 Linus pros and found that Linux might be a good area of focus for aspiring techsters.

Dice’s annual salary survey shows that salaries for Linux folks are rising at double the rate of other tech salaries. Yet the number of practicing Linux pros seems to be dwindling.

Hiring managers in the Linux survey said they were finding it difficult to source good Linux talent — 90 percent said so this year as opposed to 80 percent last year. And 93 percent of those 850 hiring managers said they will be hiring a Linux person before Q3 rolls around, a 4 percent increase from last year’s survey.

Of course, with all that demand, currently employed Linux professionals are feeling like the belles of the ball, with 75 percent fielding cold calls from recruiters in the past six months. Linux pros told the foundation that when considering a move, they do take into account work-life balance (read: a normal, 40-hour work week would be nice) and work-from-home options, but the biggest pull is all about the Benjamins, i.e., extremely competitive salaries.

And the Linux job title hiring companies are most eager to fill? The humble and infinitely flexible sysadmin. The Linux Foundation says this is representative of “the growth of Linux in the enterprise to support cloud computing and big data.”

Here’s an infographic the foundation whipped up to show off other survey results:

Filed under: Dev

GitHub names the top open-source projects of 2012

Jolie O'Dell — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 18:46:11 +0000

In a recent blog post the lords of the universe over at code-hosting community GitHub laid out the biggest new open-source projects of 2012.

The GitHubbers track notability of OSS projects in a couple ways. First, they look at the number or “stars” a project has — that is, how many people find the project interesting enough to keep tabs on in a passive sense.

Second, GitHub also keeps track of how many active contributors a project has.

The company’s record-keeping for 2012 tallies up the number of new-this-year OSS projects with the most stars and the number of contributors that 2012 brought to all OSS projects, regardless of when they were started.

Without further ado, we give you — the 2012 Hubbies!*

First up, the new-in-2012 rising stars:

And here are the projects that racked up the greatest numbers of unique contributors in 2012:

*This is a disgusting term of our own devising. GitHub is not to be held responsible.

Filed under: Dev

Open-source alternatives to Instagram

Jolie O'Dell — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 17:13:50 +0000

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Instagram, what are we gonna do with you? First you sell out to the largest social network on earth, and now you want to sell us out to advertisers.

Not cool, bro. Not even remotely cool.

Fortunately for us, we’re onto your capitalistic machinations, and we’ve got a few tricks of our own.

Here, dear reader, are a few Instagram alternatives that are open-source enough for you to be certain your photos, locations, and web browsing data will never be used against you.

Anypic

Anypic is a sweet little app from Parse, a Y Combinator-incubated company we’ve written about quite a bit in the past. You can log in with Facebook; it lets you capture and share images with your friends from inside a slick, Instagram-like user interface.

Best of all, you can download the source code and create your own version (aka “fork”) of the Anypic code, if you’re so inclined. Parse built the app as proof-of-concept for its product, a mobile platform, so it’s not at all interested in making money from end users based on their private data.

Fork it: GitHub repo

VintageJS

VintageJS is a desktop-based tool for adding retro filters to your photos. It uses some nifty HTML5 canvas tricks to make the whole thing work. You can adjust the vignetting, add blur effects, switch up the color curves, and more, all with simple one-click buttons. VintageJS also has its own built-in sharing tools for Facebook and Twitter.

Fork it: GitHub repo

OpenPhoto

OpenPhoto’s iPhone app brings you photo-syncing, easy browsing and scouring, and filters courtesy of Aviary, the photo-app developer’s toolkit. OpenPhoto itself is all about taking control of your images and albums no matter where they’re stored, so you can get used to great organization and storage options, too.

Here’s a bit more about how that works:

The OpenPhoto Android app is coming soon, the project’s leaders say.

Fork it: GitHub repo

Backspaces

The self-proclaimed open-source Instagram is Backspaces, an iPhone app that brings image-based storytelling — and yes, yes, those hipsterrific photo filters you so desperately love — into your sticky hands. It pairs a Tumblr-like series of callout boxes with your images to create cute micro-pages about a given topic, event, or story in your life. Example: The Backspaces team’s story about building the app.

Fork it: GitHub repo

CamanJS

Finally, from former Twitpic engineer Ryan LeFevre, we have CamanJS. Perhaps due to LeFevre’s experience in the word of mobile and browser-based photo-sharing, the quality of the editing and preset filters for Caman JS are truly elegant, both subtle and stunning. Check out this interactive example to see it in action. The toolset is available as a web app, Filters.io, which can connect to a plethora of accounts, including Instagram, Facebook, Flick, and even Dropbox. You can also upload photos or edit them directly from a URL.

Or you can use this filter set as the Lomo+ Chrome plugin right now; it lets you right-click on any image to instantly filter it as you browse around the Innertubes. Hooray!

Here’s a demo:

Fork it: GitHub repo

Top image courtesy of holbox, Shutterstock

Filed under: Business, Dev, Mobile

You’re invited: Facebook’s first-ever hardware hackathon

Jolie O'Dell — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 18:53:52 +0000

Facebook’s Open Compute Project, a huge effort to create and promote open-source hardware, is hosting its first-ever hardware hackathon.

The hackathon will take place next month in Santa Clara, Calif., at the OCP’s Open Compute Summit. The hackathon’s goal is to create a set of open-source computer hardware building blocks — kind of like Lego for computing. These blocks would eventually be applied to real-world use cases in large data centers in ways that would boost energy efficiency, make repairs simpler, and reduce overall data center costs.

Hackathon participants will be limited to just 100 people, and hardware hackers will spend between 6 and 10 hours working on the project during the two-day conference. Hackers will work in teams and will present their results at the end of the Summit.

The hackathon is a joint project between the OCP and Upverter, a DEMO-launched open-source hardware startup we’ve been keeping tabs on since it launched back in September 2011. Upverter founder Zac Homuth told VentureBeat via email that hackers in the upcoming event will be using Upverter’s software tools for the hackathon. Upverter will also be giving participants plenty of reference materials, tutorials, and one-on-one guidance throughout the event.

The Open Compute Summit will take place at the Santa Clara Convention Center on January 16 and 17, 2012. You can register now for the hackathon and the Summit. The ideation phase — which Upverter will also help with — starts as soon as you register.

Top image courtesy of Smileus, Shutterstock

Filed under: Dev

Facebook open-sources part of its big-data infrastructure, Corona

Jolie O'Dell — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 20:00:35 +0000

It’s unlikely that you, Dear Reader, will ever experience the big-data challenges or infrastructure demands of a Facebook-scale, billion-user software platform. But if you do, you’ll be happy to know that the company is sharing a sip of its secret sauce today.

Called Corona, the aforementioned sip contains a more efficient way to handle scheduling for Apache Hadoop MapReduce.

Facebook’s been Hadoop/MapReduce powered for some time now, “and that served us well for several years,” writes the Corona team today on the company’s dev blog. “But by early 2011, we started reaching the limits of that system. … It was pretty clear that we would ultimately need a better scheduling framework.”

The team briefly flirted with YARN as an alternative, but there were too many incompatibilities with Facebook’s version of HDFS, and the team was fairly sure YARN couldn’t handle Facebook-scale workloads.

So the Facebook infrastructure team started working on a MapReduce scheduler that would scale better, be easier to upgrade, have lower latency for small jobs, make better use of clusters, and schedule “based on actual task resource requirements rather than a count of map and reduce tasks.”

The result is Corona, a push-based scheduling framework that removes cluster resource management from job coordination, tracking the nodes and free resources continuously for minimal latency.

And if that sentence totally made sense to you, you can check out Corona on GitHub now — that’s the version Facebook is currently running in production.

“Corona has allowed us to achieve our initial goals of greater scalability, lower latency, no-downtime upgrades, and better resource management,” the team concluded.

“It has also helped us achieve better scheduling fairness, faster job restartability, a cleaner code base, and the ability to integrate with other systems for scheduling.”

Facebook will be making upgrades to Corona as time goes by, since it’s now a core part of the company’s infrastructure.

Filed under: Big Data, Business, Dev

Meet the first class of startups from the open-source Y Combinator, nReduce

Jolie O'Dell — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 19:38:58 +0000

When you start your business by taking a big swing at a widely venerated institution like Y Combinator, people are bound to take notice. Then, they’ll keep watching to see if you can follow through.

Today, a new class of startups is launching from nReduce, which got its start a few months ago as a self-proclaimed neo-Y Combinator. Now, eight of the best startups from its first batch are giving online demonstrations.

At first glance, it’s the usual demo day mix of “it’s like this for that” apps, boring-on-the-outside money-makers, and social networking tools.

So what makes nReduce special?

The nReduce team wanted to open up the YC process and take in more (and more diverse) teams than Y Combinator could handle. By June 4, 2012, nReduce had already registered 624 teams — roughly seven times the size of today’s Y Combinator classes.

“The demand for Y Combinator has far outstripped supply,” nReduce cofounder and Ruby on Rails guru Jacques Crocker said in a recent VentureBeat interview.

“There’s plenty of amazing teams that are either being rejected from YC or don’t fit in the narrow guidelines of a YC company. But they could use some of the energy that comes from a group of startups coming together and working together over a short period. We think there’s an opportunity for startups to band together to build something that rivals YC in scope and one that produces startups of the equal or better quality.”

One early nReduce participant, Forward founder Eric Ingram, had been accepted into Y Combinator in the past as well. “We participated for a while, but activity dropped off quick, and we continued outside nReduce,” he told VentureBeat in a Twitter exchange.

“In general it was night/day compared to YC (did that too), which spends more time directly with founders. Teams dropped off the radar and started giving less and less feedback. The opposite happens in YC.”

Another participant, SeatLife founder Jeff Hurlock, said, “As a solo founder its helped keep me on track every week. Teams have dropped out along the way, but that was expected. The engagement between companies and the mentors is very low. This can be improved, and I’m sure will be a focus for nReduce.”

Of course, some of this drop-off was anticipated by the nReduce founding team. “Any true test of an incubator shouldn’t be about getting in,” Crocker told VentureBeat.

“The test is actually executing. Our startups are required to make progress every week. … Startups who miss checking in or are obviously not progressing will be dropped from the program. The end group of startups who survive and get to demo day will consist purely of the teams who can ship and build traction.”

Today’s string of demos was held online. The format itself was a breath of fresh air, with an interesting mix of live video demos and crowdsourced questions for the founders. In theory, the idea is much, much more lively and interesting than a traditional demo day, which can drag on for hours as an endless string of startups, some of which you’re not remotely interested in, parades across a stage in increasingly flashy and irrelevant demonstrations.

In practice, there were a few technical hiccups at the beginning, but overall, the one-on-one feeling of the live video Q&As with founders felt intimate, relevant, and right. Plus, without the pressure of time-constrained onstage demo, you got to actually spend time looking at the products you liked and questioning the teams you found interesting. For press and investors, I can’t imagine a more rewarding and efficient demo experience.

From what we could see, nReduce has turned out some excellent products and teams. Here’s a look at the eight companies that were demonstrated today:

Top image courtesy of Hasloo Group Production Studio, Shutterstock

Filed under: Dev

Twitter joins the Linux Foundation for more open-source street cred

Jolie O'Dell — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 19:47:36 +0000

Twitter uses and builds a fair amount of open-source software, so it wasn’t too shocking when we read in our inboxes this morning that the social media startup has joined the Linux Foundation.

“Not only is Twitter built on Linux, but open source software is core to its technology strategy,” said a Linux Foundation rep to VentureBeat via email.

“It’s investing even more in the platform now as the company evolves and positions itself for the future. Linux has become even more dominant among web-based companies as the ‘hacker way’ has become pervasive among the newest generation of startups.”

Ah, yes, the Hacker Way. Or should we say, the “Hacker Way.”

Espousing open-source ideals, at least in spirit, has become increasingly common among web startups, especially in the Bay Area. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg famously wrote a “hacker way” mini-treatise into his company’s SEC IPO filing.

But in fact, while companies like Facebook and Twitter rely on open-source technologies and programming languages to get their various jobs done, their businesses are conceptually based on proprietary software, not open-source software.

As famous hacker Eric “esr” Raymond pointed out in a recent interview with VentureBeat, the true hacker way means “to give control to the individual, to respect his or her privacy, to create tools for autonomy and liberty, and to encourage creative re-use of software” — only parts of which are built into Twitter’s products.

While Twitter has open-sourced some of its software — a load-balancer called Iago and a design framework called Bootstrap, for example — vast expanses of Twitter code remain under lock and key, and the company’s recent and coming API changes means it’s getting farther away from anyone’s definition of free and open-source software.

This is a problem. Specifically, it’s a recruitment problem.

Twitter needs to continue to pull in the best, brightest, neckbeardiest developers the world can offer, and it can’t do so without some commitment to open-source communities. The company actually recently hosted an open-source event with thinly veiled recruitment mechanisms built in just for this reason: great developers and open-source software go together like peanut butter and jelly, and the more you can convince a great developer that your company believes in open-source, the more likely you are to recruit great developers in a highly competitive hiring environment.

All that being said, Twitter does have a vested interest in helping to advance the cause of Linux in particular, and some participation in open-source communities is better than none at all.

As a web-based business, Twitter, like every other web service, is supported by tens of thousands of Linux servers. In a statement on today’s news, the company said it intends to partner with the Linux Foundation to promote and protect Linux, the open-source operating system.

“Linux and its capability to be heavily tweaked is fundamental to our technology infrastructure,” said Twitter open-source manager Chris Aniszczyk in the statement.

“By joining the Linux Foundation, we can support an organization that is important to us and collaborate with a community that is advancing Linux as fast as we are improving Twitter.”

Filed under: Dev

Open-source Meteor takes a huge $11.2M first round; will Andreessen Horowitz get the cash back?

Jolie O'Dell — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 13:30:22 +0000

Meteor Development Group has pulled in $11.2 million in funding to make building client-side web apps super easy and super fast. This is the group’s first institutional funding round, and it’s a rather large one at that.

Meteor is open-sourced (under the MIT license) and JavaScript-centric. Meteor apps run in the browser rather than on a web server, and they grab data from cloud services as they run.

The Meteor team notes that some of the biggest names in web apps — Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. — employ roughly the same technique. Meteor just scales it down for teams and apps that don’t have an army of high-genius developers at their disposal.

“We want to create the universal standard for writing this kind of application, and that will only happen through broad industry cooperation,” said Meteor co-author Matt DeBergalis in a statement.

“It’s clear to everyone that we need something new. Will it be Meteor? What we see today is that it is open source developers that drive the technology that is ultimately adopted everywhere else in the industry. So it depends on whether the open-source community chooses to rally around Meteor.”

Here’s a brief screencast demo:

The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Matrix Partners and a few others. The question is, what the heck are a bunch of Silicon Valley fat cats doing throwing such a sizable sum at an open-source project?

The project is free-as-in-beer for anyone to use; it’s also free-as-in-freedom for anyone to modify. And the group plans to make money in the time-honored way that a bunch of FOSSies make money: selling support.

“Eventually, we will sell additional tools targeted to larger enterprises that want to integrate Meteor with their existing on-prem and off-prem IT infrastructure,” reads a statement from Meteor.

“JavaScript is fast becoming the most popular programming language for web development and Meteor is front and center in the JavaScript community,” said Andreessen Horowitz general partner Peter Levine in a statement on the funding.

“By addressing simplicity and scalability, Meteor is a great platform for enterprise web development. We are delighted to be partnering with [the Meteor Development Group co-founders] as they build out the next generation web development tools.”

We love to see open-source diehards making good, both on delivering valuable tools and on making enough cash to be sustainable, so we’ll be keeping a close eye on Meteor.

Hilarious image courtesy of AISPIX, Shutterstock

Filed under: Deals, Dev

Here’s what Firefox OS is going to look like on your phone

Jolie O'Dell — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 20:02:35 +0000

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

We’ve been itching to know more about Firefox OS ever since Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs started talking real talk about it to us at SXSW.

And today, we got screenshots. Hooray!

UPDATE, 2:55 p.m. Pacific: A Mozilla rep emailed us back to share the following: “Those screenshots are of Firefox OS, but are outdated. We’ll share new images soon. As an open source company developing products in the open, you can expect to see in-progress mock ups and screenshots of all of our projects as they evolve. These are not any indication of the final product. We’ll keep you posted as we have more to share.”

What we see so far is a relatively simple, touchable interface; pretty typography and big, glossy images; notification pull-downs and roundy-roundy app icons. In a word, it’s about what we’d expect from a company that wants to keep pace with Microsoft, Apple, and Google in terms of what it offers consumers — and, more importantly, in terms of how those offerings affect the state of the industry.

Here’s a sneak peek:

We’re waiting to get more details directly from Mozilla; since they’re generally rather open, being an open-source operation and all, we expect to hear back from them momentarily and will update this post if any new information is revealed.

hat tip: TechWeekEurope, top image courtesy of SewinMachine

Filed under: Mobile

Desperately seeking Google: Facebook’s open-hardware crusade is still missing its biggest player

Jolie O'Dell — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 17:30:26 +0000

When Facebook decided to open-source the hardware that makes its data centers some of the most energy-efficient and innovative in the tech industry, others tech giants were eager to join in and open-source their Internet hardware as well. But not the biggest do-gooder, greenster, data center magnate of them all: Google.

The goal was to drastically and rapidly improve energy efficiency in data centers. This coalition of web and hardware giants is known as the Open Compute Project, and so far, only one name in mainstream tech is still glaringly absent from its membership roster.

While Facebook and Google have a historically tense relationship over business matters large and small, no one involved in Open Compute can put a finger on exactly why Google refuses to get involved. After all, the project fits right in with Google’s “do no evil” ethos and campaigns for more ecologically friendly data centers.

And while Google has previously hinted that energy efficiency is part of its competitive advantage, many other companies that could say the same thing have still wholeheartedly devoted their time and intellectual property to Open Compute.

So what’s the hang-up with Google?

Facebook’s first open-source hardware plan, drawn on a napkin

VentureBeat has reached out to Google several times over the past year; until last week, no one has been able to speak directly about Google’s data center innovations or its official stance on the Open Compute project.

When we finally got the chance to sit down with Urs Hölzle, Google’s infrastructure czar, he confirmed what third parties have long been telling us: Google won’t play ball because it thinks its hardware constitutes a competitive advantage. (We’ll be publishing Hölzle’s fuller thoughts on the subject tomorrow morning.)

In a recent conversation at Facebook’s Menlo Park campus, hardware design director Frank Frankovsky, the guru behind much of Facebook’s Open Compute work, highlighted just how many companies outside Facebook have piled onto the Open Compute bandwagon.

“There have been a number of new contributions,” he said. “An example would be the Financial District, one of the earliest adopters of Linux. … They’ve been pretty passionate about Open Compute, and they kicked off projects with Intel and AMD [to build and customize their own hardware].”

In the past six months alone, newcomers like AMD, HP, West Digital, Fidelity, Salseforce, Applied Micto, Quanta, NTT Data, ZT Systems, Emulex, DataDirect, Tencent, and Vantage data centers have joined Open Compute, which already counts Rackspace, Intel, Salesforce, Alibaba, and many others as members.

Some companies have even turned over their own projects, such as AMD’s Roadrunner, Tencent’s Project Scorpio, and Intel’s Decathelete, to Open Compute for its incubation committee or for inclusion in the project.

“This reminds me a little bit of the Brady Bunch,” said Frankovsky. As the various projects are converged and standardized, they become more valuable for large enterprises and manufacturers as well as for the project’s members themselves.

“Open Compute might evolve into a broader focus over time,” he said. There’s a possibility that the same open-source workflow that’s being applied to this data center hardware might someday be applied to other networked devices and even mobile devices. Can you imagine, for example, how the community might work together to solve issues like cell phone battery life?

“We might spread our wings,” Frankovsky concluded, “but for now, we want to stay focused on data centers, servers, and storage.”

Open-source hardware at work in Facebook’s data center in Prineville, Oregon

And for the companies that have so far been involved in Open Compute, the Facebook team and Open Compute partners we’ve spoken to have had nothing but positive comments on the experience — and on the project’s impact on their collective bottom line.

“The benefits of sharing so far outweight the beneifts of keeping it all closed,” said Frankovsky. Of Google’s “competitive advantage” argument, he added, “I have trouble getting myself in the mindset of thinking the infrastructure is a strategic advantage from a cost perspective. It’s really more about serving the end users — that’s what differentiates a business.”

Frankovsky and the rest of the Facebookers we talked to during this visit never mentioned Google by name, but this was the competitor clearly on their minds. From the Open Compute perspective, Google’s true competitive advantage is in its search algorithm, its web-based software, its colossal reach, and not in its racks.

When we brought up the search company directly, Frankovsky said, “We’d love to see a lot more of our peers and competitors show up for this. I know they’ve made mistakes we’re about to make. … By sharing those great successes as well as the mistakes, we could save a lot of time and effort.”

“We keep reaching out,” he said. “Sometimes they show up in listen-only mode.”

Frankovsky’s “missed connections” statement seems resigned but not angry. However, other Facebookers we’ve spoken to, including data center employees, have not been shy about expressing their frustration over Google’s recalcitrance.

“This isn’t an all or nothing approach,” said Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s engineering VP. He said that, if it so chose, Google could open-source bits and pieces of its data center and server technology without revealing the full recipe of its secret sauce.

“It’s disappointing when people don’t participate when they can selectively share with the community,” he said. “There’s lots of room for how you run the software to create a competitive advantage.”

Ultimately, he said, he expects Open Compute’s innovations to achieve a Linux-like stature and ubiquity. “The investment of the industry in Linux caused it to be superior to [Sun Microsystems'] Solaris over time,” he said. “It’s hard to bet against a large collective of people applying all their IP in a project.”

Schroepfer, who ran Firefox development for many years while working for Mozilla, has made his career in open-source and said that open source has become “the de facto way you do software.” But, he added, it’s been harder to get even seasoned open-source advocates like Google onboard when it comes to hardware.

“[It's essential] for everyone in the industry to get as power-efficient as possible, both for their bottom line and for the planet,” he said.

And he thinks Open Compute is well on its way to accomplishing that goal. “It’s astonishing to see the quality of [Open Compute] technology in production,” he said, in reference to a visit he made to Facebook’s Prineville data center, where he was making repairs to a Freedom open-source server.

Open Compute isn’t a perfect project, and its players aren’t perfect, either. But we can’t shake the sense of disappointment that Google hasn’t yet stepped up, with all its knowledge about energy efficiency and its many years of experience in building and optimizing data centers, to participate in the project.

But this isn’t the first Facebook-led open-source project Google’s backed away from. For comparison, we bring up Ringmark and the W3C’s Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group. These Facebook-fronted efforts are intended to fix one of the worst pain points in technology — and one of the points of greatest promise — the mobile web.

But as Facebook stepped forward to lead the charge and open-source its information, Google turned its back on the project, an especially odd move given Google’s interest in the mobile ecosystem vis-à-vis Android and Chrome’s new mobile browser, not to mention Google’s historical and significant participation in the free and open-source software movement. At that time, a Google spokesperson declined to speak directly about the W3C group, instead focusing on the company’s own mobile browser and operating system work.

It’s a bit naïve, a bit “kumbaya,” to expect two titans viciously warring for revenue to come to a round table and collaborate on issues like innovative mobile tech and greener data centers. But somehow, without striking a blow, Facebook has managed to give Google a black eye. Perhaps, if only for PR purposes, it’s time for Google to get its “kumbaya” back.

Images of Facebook’s Prineville data center courtesy of Jolie O’Dell

Filed under: Dev, Green

Twitter hosts hacker open-house, not-so-secret recruitment event

Jolie O'Dell — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 17:40:34 +0000

Twitter is opening its doors to open-source hackers for a few hours next Thursday night.

The OSS-themed open house will bring some of the brightest software engineers and developers to Twitter’s fancy new Art Deco headquarters for the “Twitter Runtime Systems Summit: Open Source Edition.”

Topics discussed will include Zipkin, the company’s open-source, homebrewed distributed tracing system; Twemcache, Twitter’s tweaked memcached fork; and how the microblogging service is using Apache Mesos, a platform for resource isolation and sharing for distributed applications and frameworks.

Speakers will include Twitter runtime engineer Vinod Kone, onetime Hadoop/Cassandra contributor Johan Oskarsson, Apache Hive contributor Franklin Hu, Twitter cache team lead Manju Rajashekhar, cache team member Yao Yue, and Berkeley compsci PhD candidate Benjamin Hindman.

Of course, this is one very clever way of widening Twitter’s pool of software developer job applicants. These poor, helpless neckbeards* are being lured into Twitter’s gingerbread house with promises of open-source software, only to be polled on the Eventbrite page about their interest in a job at Twitter.

FOSS itself is, for many of the cleverer and hotter startups in the area, one big HR recruitment ploy. Devs love working with it, working on it, and contributing to it. And when we call it a “ploy,” we only mean it’s a ploy in the most jovial sense. In an open-source, open-house recruitment gambit, everyone wins, including devs, recruiters, and even the end users whose online lives depend on open-source software. And in an extremely, ridiculously competitive hiring environment, it’s actually a pretty good way to cast a dragnet for the kinds of devs you’re seeking.

The event will take place Thursday, July 26 and will begin at 6:30 p.m. You’ll need to book a free ticket on Eventbrite (linked above), but they’re going fast.

*Note: The term “neckbeard” is not used with any kind of derision. The author of this post would be a full-on neckbeard if she possessed the necessary Y-chromosomes to do so.

Image courtesy of olly, Shutterstock

Filed under: Dev

Twitter open-sources Iago load generator, so you can check yourself before you wreck yourself

Jolie O'Dell — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 18:34:28 +0000

Ok, ok, make the obvious Twitter downtime jokes; go ahead, get it out of your system.

Done? Good. Here’s some fun news:

Twitter has just open-sourced Iago, a load generator it developed internally and that it has been using in a dogfoody sort of way.

(For you non-developer readers, a load generator fakes high-volume website traffic to test new features and services before they become available to the public, allowing the developers to tweak the feature or service for large scale use without watching it crash and burn in front of a live audience.)

“Iago has been used at Twitter throughout our stack, from our core database interfaces, storage sub-systems and domain logic, up to the systems accepting front-end web requests,” Twitter open-source guy Chris Aniszczyk wrote this morning on the company blog.

“We routinely evaluate new hardware with it, have extended it to support correctness testing at scale, and use it to test highly specific endpoints such as the new tailored trends, personalized search, and Discovery releases. We’ve used it to model anticipated load for large events as well as the overall growth of our system over time. It’s also good for providing background traffic while other tests are running, simply to provide the correct mix of usage that we will encounter in production.”

Aniszczyk says Iago is particularly well-suited to Twitter’s needs for three reasons: high performance (precise and predictable load generation), built-in support for multiple protocols, and the fact that it’s designed to be extensible.

Iago is now open-sourced at GitHub under the Apache Public License 2.0; check it out for yourself, all ye interested parties.

Filed under: Dev

Facebook unveils Folly, a treasure trove of open-source C++ gold

Jolie O'Dell — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 22:00:35 +0000

“Facebook’s Folly” — sounds like a mid-life-crisis-type watercraft, doesn’t it? But it’s actually a huge bundle of C++ utilities focused on speed, ease of use, and interoperability with other C++ libraries you already use.

The collection of reusable C++ library artifacts was developed in-house at Facebook to meet the needs of Facebook’s engineers. As they have done in the past with other open-source projects like Cassandra, HipHop, and Thrift, Facebook’s developers have now placed Folly into the realm of open-source software.

“The development of [Folly] was fueled by the desire to create complementary utilities that allowed us to move fast and not reinvent any wheels,” a Facebooker told VentureBeat last night in an email. “We worked to make this library as fast and easy-to-use as possible.”

The rep noted that Folly is obviously going to be useful for developers of large-scale, distributed apps with significant performance challenges. But he said the library is also “of general utility” for other types of C++-using developers, as well.

“Folly also contains state-of-the-art work-alikes for two common C++ standard library utilities (std::string and std::vector), which may be useful for anyone who does not have access or a license to a quality C++ standard library, or who might want to use those classes in an embedded setting where they are avoiding most of the rest of the standard library for code size reasons,” he said.

Also, because it breaks dependencies on Facebook’s internal code, Folly will allow Facebook to open-source even more of its homebrewed software — an exciting prospect, given the caliber of engineer the company hires.

The company announced the library today during the C++ conference at its Menlo Park headquarters.

“This is code that runs on thousands of servers doing work on behalf of 900 million users every day,” wrote Facebook software engineer Jordan DeLong today on the company blog. “The over-arching theme for all of the components is high performance at scale.”

DeLong said that Folly was built for comfort as well as speed, meaning it’s easier to use and faster to work with than other alternatives. He also said Folly plays well with others (other C++ libraries of quality, that is). “We have a low tolerance for “Not Invented Here” syndrome,” he said.

You can check out Folly for yourself on Facebook’s Gitub page.

Top image courtesy of Gemenacom, Shutterstock

Filed under: Business, Dev

Facebook’s open-source hardware project gets new momentum, new allies, and new specs

Jolie O'Dell — Wed, 02 May 2012 15:29:27 +0000

What do HP, Salesforce, AMD, VMWare, and Alibaba all have in common?

They’re all partners in the Facebook-led Open Compute Project, a group that aims to revolutionize computer hardware through the power of open-source collaboration.

Facebook’s Open Compute Project is having its third Summit event today, and it’s bringing together some of the best minds in the world to solve problems of data center efficiency, server design, and more.

Most of its partner companies have a stake in the issue, either because they use massive server resources, because they design and sell hardware and chips, or because they are involved in creating the software that makes all this hardware more efficient.

“The momentum that has gathered behind the project – especially in the last six months — has been nothing short of amazing,” wrote Frank Frankovsky, Facebook’s hardware design guru, in a blog post this morning.

Frankovsky notes that the OCP now includes HP, AMD, Tencent, Salesforce, VMware, Canonical, Vantage, Alibaba, Supermicro, and Cloudscaling among its members, and that HP, Quanta, and Tencent have also joined the project’s Incubation Committee. This committee is responsible for reviewing proposals for official OCP support.

As far as new projects are concerned, Frankovksy said OCP has accepted proposals for a vanity-free storage server called “Knox”) and two high-efficiency motherboards, code-named “Roadrunner” and “Decathlete,” designed with the specific needs of financial services companies in mind.

OCP is also merging specs with Baidu and Tencent for its Open Rack design for servers.

Finally, the OCP project is doing what most open-source projects do these days: It’s launching support services for customers to easily and comfortably get started with its Open Rack designs. The OCP Solutions Provider program will allow companies to sell and use hardware based on OCP specs.

“Companies currently pursuing Solutions Provider status include Hyve, ZT Systems, and Avnet, as well as new business units from Quanta and Wistron (called QCT and Wiwynn, respectively) that have been launched to sell directly to consumers,” Frankovsky concluded.

The OCP got rolling about one year ago. At that time, Facebook’s vision of open-source hardware got started because Facebook itself was having trouble scaling its servers out in a way that made business sense.

“We looked at why things were done the way they were, and it always came down to legacy. Challenging legacies and starting from scratch was the most innovative thing we did in the project,” Facebook OCP lead Amir Michae told VentureBeat in an interview last fall.

“It’s natural in an environment where companies are trying to remain profitable to keep some pieces of innovation to themselves. But they also need to be able to share and engage with the community,” Michael concluded, encouraging other companies to get involved in the open-source hardware project.

Stay tuned for more coming up soon from today’s Open Compute Project Summit.

Also, if this is a story you find interesting, you should check out what Facebook is doing with Ringark, its mobile browser testing suite, and the W3C Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group.

Image courtesy of Jolie O’Dell

Filed under: Dev

You — yes, you — are using Linux, and you probably don’t even know it

Jolie O'Dell — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 17:57:05 +0000

Linux is everywhere. You might not see it, and you probably don’t know it yet, but it’s powering the web services you use, the phone in your hand, and the ATM at your bank.

The following video, just released by the Linux Foundation, is all about the places and apps where Linux is lurking unseen by the average consumer. It also goes into some detail about how Linux, a free and open-source operating system, is built collaboratively by a global army of volunteer developers. Altogether, around six patches get applied to the Linux kernel every hour. Crazy, innit?

“Linux is the most dominant OS in supercomputing,” said Amanda McPherson, vice president of marketing and developer programs at the Linux Foundation, in an email exchange with VentureBeat. “As for mobile and embedded [devices,] every Android has Linux in it.”

McPherson noted that Linux is making some interesting moves in the automotive space, as well.

“Toyota joined the Linux Foundation not long ago, and we now host an annual event, Automotive Linux Summit, due to increasing demand from our members and industry to use Linux in next-generation cars,” she said. “Maintaining the software needed for an auto today is a huge job and not one carmakers want to depend on one vendor to handle. Carmakers have to maintain their device (the car) for five to 10 years. With Linux, they have a full community supporting and updating the software. They don’t need to worry about it.”

While the Foundation stresses that the worldwide group of Linux contributors is a truly global community, McPherson said that particularly active hotspots have blossomed in North America, Japan, Europe, and Brazil.

Filed under: Dev

In a commitment to the mobile web, Facebook open-sources Ringmark

Jolie O'Dell — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 17:28:35 +0000

Today, Facebook has open-sourced Ringmark, its new test suite for mobile device manufacturers.

Ringmark, which was announced just a few weeks ago at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, is designed to run “tests of core functionality that web developers need in order to build their apps.” Ringmark is all about increasing the capabilites of the mobile web across devices and platforms.

“Ultimately, we believe that web technologies are important to the future of mobile and that we can help to make HTML5 a well-supported platform for mobile developers to build upon,” Facebook engineer Matt Kelly wrote today on the Facebook developer blog.

“For those that are building with the web today, it’s a major hurdle to learn native technologies like Objective-C and Java, and we hope that an improved mobile web can unlock a large contingency of developers that could, and will, be developing for mobile.”

A slew of powerful web companies, including Mozilla and Yahoo, have taken approximately the same stance and are focusing on technologies that make the open, mobile web — not just single-platform technology stacks like Android and iOS — a fruitful environment for mobile developers.

“Forget being in love with the open web and all that touchy-feely stuff,” Mozilla VP Jay Sullivan told VentureBeat in a recent interview. “If you want to have a variety of mobile apps, it gets expensive,” he said, referring to the need to build multiple apps for all the various mobile platforms.

With technologies like Node.js and Ringmark, however, the focus is shifting from developing one-off apps for siloed platforms to ensuring that mobile web apps run and run well everywhere, including fast and reliable performance as well as beautiful user experiences.

“The mobile web has great potential but still needs a lot of work,” Kelly said. “One of the most frustrating problems was that of fragmentation in mobile browser capabilities and of understanding what’s possible on any given mobile browser.”

Ringmark is designed to increase that understanding for everyone in the mobile web app supply chain, from device manufacturers to mobile browser makers to app developers. Facebook wants it to be “the canonical testing suite” for the mobile web, allowing developers to see at a glance what works, what doesn’t work, and why — all to bring normal Joes and Janes better mobile web apps to rival the native ones designed just for their mobile OS.

Interested would-be contributors to the Ringmark suite can check out the W3C Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group as well as the Ringmark repository on GitHub.

Image courtesy of Rangizzz, Shutterstock

Filed under: Dev, Mobile

Yahoo dives deeper down the Node.js rabbit hole with open-source Mojito

Jolie O'Dell — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 15:00:49 +0000

Today, Yahoo is open-sourcing Mojito, a bit of software that uses JavaScript and Node.js to run a single codebase on both the client and server side.

Mojito is one of a few Node-centric projects Yahoo’s been brewing. Collectively called Cocktails, they embrace cutting-edge technologies and platforms in a way that is surprising if you haven’t been following developer news from Yahoo over the past couple of years.

Yahoo started dabbling in Cocktails a while ago. Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz, Yahoo’s platform vice president, has called Cocktails “a bunch of tricks to make web applications feel native.”

Today’s release, Mojito, is a first step in that direction.

“There are some JavaScript frameworks out there, and some of them focus on the server side, some run on the client side,” said Fernandez-Ruiz in a recent phone conversation with VentureBeat. “And we’ve been saying for some time that we want people to be able to run the same code on the client side and on the server side.”

From the Yahoo developer blog:

Mojito is all JavaScript, that’s good. JavaScript is the single most widely available programming language today, and that’s something worth taking advantage of.

Mojito is a true MVC framework, that’s better! MVC is a battle-tested design pattern, having proven its usefulness in desktop apps, in server-side apps, in, today, rich client-side applications. Those who ignore MVC… often reinvent it.

But the best part of Mojito is its ability to “blur” the client/server boundary, to let you write you code that runs on the client, or the server. Or both.

The reason, said Fernandez-Ruiz, is all about performance and how mobile web pages are rendered for smartphone users. It’s about speed, and it’s also about experience. “The reality is, if you go around looking at websites on an iPhone, you realize that many web pages just don’t work well,” he said. “Things are partially loaded, sometimes you get blank pages. Most of the time, this is because JavaScript that is downloaded never gets to run on the client … On the desktop, you can get away with murder, but on mobile, it’s another story.”

When mobile users are constantly testing the limits of their 3G networks, the exec said, it adds up to a really crappy experience for everyone.

Mojito is part of Yahoo’s concerted effort to help developers work with mobile users and with mobile networks in mind.

Mojito is just one Cocktail. Manhattan is another; it’s a Node.js hosted environment for Mojito. Apps can be wrapped in a native shell and shipped to the iTunes App Store or the Android Market or simply run in a browser, and Manhattan helps to speed up the user experience access across high- and low-speed networks and to run apps on platforms that don’t have full HTML5/CSS3 support.

Other Cocktails under development right now include Greyhound and Screwdriver; Yahoo has no official word yet on what those products will do or when they might be available to outside developers.

“We have been approaching some developers … to get feedback about our technology stack,” said Fernandez-Ruiz. “There’s a lot of documentation and support to make it healthy, you can’t just dump the code on Github. We have a good track record of open sourcing things and keeping them alive.”

Manhattan will be opened up for use by attendees at this week’s JS Conf. Fernandez-Ruiz said Yahoo plans to gather input and feedback from those developers and use it to determine the next steps for Manhattan.

In the meantime, Mojito is open and available for anyone to use. Fernandez-Ruiz said he hopes developers will take a look a Node, at Mojito, and at their mobile work with new eyes open to the inherent performance benefits these technologies have to offer.

“It’s time to revisit the web, to take a look at mobile networks where people are constrained and where battery life has limits,” he said. “Node.js is, in a way, like a browser that runs on the server. The browser on the mobile phone isn’t that powerful, so Node.js becomes more important.”

“If you look at OSI stack, this is like networking stuff, how you get routed,” Fernandez-Ruiz said. “Your objective is to create network servers that are efficient and low profile, very lean, something that lets you work very close to the kernel. For embedded devices that are partially connected — TVs or car devices, too — Node.js is very interesting.”

Filed under: Dev

How to develop open-source software within any kind of company

Wayne Jackson — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 18:04:16 +0000

For businesses and other organizations today, open-source software (OSS) is transformative in terms of its ability to allow organizations to write software very quickly and to leverage innovation very aggressively.

OSS component-based development has reached a strategic tipping point, having moved from a cost-effective solution to a competitive advantage capable of delivering rapid and substantial return on investment for organizations that use it.

And use it they do. More than 80 percent of modern software includes open sourcecomponents.

Typical organizations, including Global 2000 enterprises, use thousands of OSS components, often in mission-critical software portfolios. Startups can quickly bring applications to market by focusing creative development on their core competency and relying on OSS for everything else. My company’s Central Repository, containing nearly 90 percent of open source Java projects, serves more than four billion requests per year to more than 61,000 organizations per year, including more than half of the Global 2000.

A vibrant ecosystem with a fundamental flaw

The same core advantage of OSS –its free availability, rapid innovation, and highly interdependent projects — introduces risks that can sabotage the IT or business value of key applications.

The issue really boils down to two interrelated concerns:

Complex dependencies: The open source ecosystem is comprised of hundreds of thousands of components, each of which may depend on tens or hundreds of other components. The whole ecosystem is interdependent. As a result, the properties (good or bad) of any one component are inherited across many others.

A simple, but potent example might help. Version 2.5.6 of the Spring-beans contained a severe, remotely exploitable security flaw. Spring-beans is a commonly used component, and 1,447 others depend on it. So the security vulnerability was inherited by all 1,447 other components, and untold thousands of applications that rely Spring-beans directly or indirectly.

Intellectual property issues add another dimension. Every component and dependency added to an application has specific and enforceable licensing and copyright requirements. This is true even if those dependencies are added unwittingly. This is troubling for software and embedded systems vendors who might inadvertently include a copyleft license such as the GPL in their shipping products.

This exact issue has resulted in numerous and expensive lawsuits including the well-publicized instance of Cisco’s unknowing inclusion of GPL code in their Linksys routers. In this case, the Free Software Foundation sued Cisco and forced the company, among other things, to make their source code publicly available.

Lack of update notification infrastructure: Components are updated frequently; the average component in Central is updated four times year. And yet, with all this change, there is no automated mechanism for update notification.

Take the Spring-beans example. Once the security vulnerability was fixed, there was no automated mechanism for the projects that depend on the old version to be updated to the new, fixed version. Taking it one step further, absent automated update notification, none of the direct or indirect users of the flawed Spring-beans components would have any idea that their applications were at risk.

In this wild West sort of lawlessness, many organizations are clearly taking chances and hoping for the best. A 2012 survey we conducted among 2,550 developers, architects, and managers found that only 20 percent of organizations have put effective open source management policies in place.

Order out of chaos: A strategy for optimization

Strategizing to yield the greatest ROI in using OSS demands a high-level awareness of how, why, and where OSS is used, along with consistent knowledge of OSS benefits, risks, and policies.

To this end, several vendors offer software composition analysis tools that apply data mining technology for use in inspecting OSS components for security and functionality issues, known fixes, IP ownership, and versioning. The best of these tools enable organizations to govern development processes, continuously monitor the health of their repositories, and retrieve real-time alerts when critical applications are affected by newly discovered threats.

To maximize the business value of OSS while minimizing risks:

Assess your current usage of OSS components to grasp where you’re starting from, as an aid to setting realistic goals.
Establish an open source governance program to filter, audit, track and manage open-source assets in the organization, and deploy mechanisms to monitor the effectiveness of your governance program.
Build open source management into your entire software development process, evaluating OSS components before and while using them in development .
Analyze and continuously monitor all deployed applications for newly discovered security vulnerabilities and stability issues.
Establish well-defined channels of acquisition (such as the Central Repository) for each OSS component you leverage.
Engage with the OSS community and establish routes to service and support for key components and frameworks.

Properly managing the use of OSS in development will let you focus not merely on the cost savings it can bring you, but also on the wealth of innovation ongoing in the open source domain. It will help make OSS a catalyst for change in your organization.

Wayne Jackson is CEO of Sonatype, a company that is transforming software development with tools, information, and services that enable organizations to build better software faster using open-source components. Contact him at wjackson@sonatype.com.

Image courtesy of olly, Shutterstock

Filed under: Dev

Rackspace open-sources Dreadnot for failure-free software deployment with Node.js

Jolie O'Dell — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 19:44:51 +0000

The hard-working nerds at Rackspace have a gift for you: Dreadnot, their homebrewed software deployment solution.

It’s free and open-source; it’s built with Node.js; it purports to make continuous deployment a breeze (relatively speaking); and if all that doesn’t excite you, you’re probably not the kind of hacker that would find this post interesting, in which case we direct you to this video of a robot petting a kitten.

Our good buddy Paul Quera, who was recently hanging out in the VentureBeat video studio to chat about Node.js, writes on the Rackspace blog that Dreadnot was created to deploy large-scale software with a minimum of manual labor and/or Kafkaesque horror-scapes of failure.

“The Rackspace Cloud Monitoring team is fanatical about continuous deployment,” he says. “We love being able to iterate quickly on our product and believe that our customers will get the best experience possible by doing so.”

Originally, the Rackspace cloud monitoring team had been using Etsy’s Deployinator for these tasks.

However, as Querna points out, “The Deployinator was developed for a single region product and took some shortcuts… Each [Rackspace] team was faced with creating many customizations in Deployinator to fit the models we desired.” The team also needed a solution for multiple-region deployments, which Deployinator didn’t support.

So the Rackspacecadets went back to the drawing board and built Dreadnot, which Querna calls “a relatively simple Node.js application built on top of the Express web framework and Twitter’s Bootstrap Javascript and CSS utilities.”

Dreadnot gives clever engineers like you a step-by-step control mechanism and window into the deployment process.

If any of its steps fail, Dreadnot will pause its operations and wait for you, the aforementioned clever engineer, to address the issues, all while directing traffic to another region.

“Dreadnot was developed to assist with the most common multiple region deployments,” Querna writes. “However, for the complicated deployments, or those deployments that experience a fatal error, you can proceed manually without interference from Dreadnot.”

When Dreadnot is finished with deployment for that region, it reconfigures the load balancers to direct traffic back to the newly enhanced region. Then, Dreadnot lathers, rinses and repeats for the rest of the regions in the deployment.

Qurena also explains that staging and other environments get isolated Dreadnot instances for security reasons and to keep testing separate from production code.

Dreadnot is open sourced under the Apache License version 2.0. Go get it (or fork it, or whatever) on Github.

Filed under: Dev

Exclusive: Facebook opens up about open-source software

Jolie O'Dell — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 21:10:57 +0000

This is the second of a two-part exclusive on Facebook’s involvement with and creation of open source technologies. The first installment focused on hardware. For these articles, we spoke with two of Facebook’s open source gurus, David Recordon and Amir Michael, about how the company is opening its infrastructure to other developers and organizations.

Sitting across from Facebook’s senior open programs manager David Recordon at the company’s Palo Alto headquarters, we asked the young open-source expert if working on open source software at a proprietary software company presented him with any ethical dilemmas.

“Absolutely not,” he responded. “Look at the amount of open-source software that we do release. We release far more of our infrastructure that we develop than any other company like us.

“And it’s hard. It requires effort to take software for your own environment and make it something that’s useful to others, too. Making a healthy project and accepting contributions takes time and focus.”

The social media company has, without question, taken the time to work on those projects. The hackers at Facebook have done perhaps more than any other single entity to advance and optimize PHP, the programming language on which the network is primarily built.

Facebook’s OSS projects

Recordon can rattle off any number of important OSS projects released by Facebook during his two-year tenure at the company. Before he joined Facebook, Recordon was a founding board member of the OpenID Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to improving the way identities and logins are managed around the web.

Now, Recordon is building the team at Facebook that focuses on OSS and web standards, which includes technologies such as HTML5 and Oauth. He oversees both bringing in and pushing out worthy open-source projects to the company’s engineers and the larger community.

Some of those projects include Phabricator, a suite of web apps for code review and how Facebook does their own development; Cassandra, an open source distributed database management system; the waves-making HipHop, which transforms source code from PHP to C++; the company’s Javascript optimization efforts, called Primer; XHP, a PHP extension which augments the syntax of the language such that XML document fragments become valid PHP expressions; and Thrift, a software framework for scalable cross-language services development, to name but a few.

More remarkable still, all of these diverse and useful projects have come from a relatively small business over the course of less than four years. This is what Facebook engineers are doing in their spare time, folks.

“We value moving fast,” Recordon said. “The rate at which we build infrastructure and make changes, I haven’t seen anything like it. That’s core to our culture.”

Facebook’s hacker culture

Recordon describes the company’s expectations of engineers as “very entrepreneurial. We value the impact a single person or a small team can have. Video calling was built by one engineer and one designer. The messenger app was done by a few engineers. Those groups have a huge impact.”

While Facebook is out looking for those smart, motivated engineers to hack within the company independently or in small groups, hackers themselves are attracted to exactly that kind of opportunity — and working on open-source projects can be a huge selling point in Facebook’s recruitment process.

“Engineers enjoy working on open source,” Recordon said. “Culturally, it allows engineers to talk about what they’re working on publicly. Open-source software also allows people to see the kind of infrastructure we build. It gets people in some areas a taste of the code we’re running in production.”

In addition to working on in-house OSS projects, Facebook engineers are frequently core contributors to other open-source projects, such as Hadoop and Hive. “But those are tools [the data infrastructure team] uses to get their job done,” said Recordon.

Facebook’s OSS workflow

In a hacker-centeric culture that values independent work, how does Facebook, the organization, decide which projects get institutional support and which also get open-sourced? We asked Recordon what the process was like for HipHop.

“HipHop started three years ago, when the site was going through a tremendous growth curve,” Recordon told us. “We needed to optimize the PHP behind the site, and there were three competing projects at the time trying to do that. One was looking at tweaks around PHP itself. Another was working on a Java runtime for PHP, and then there was HipHop. On the risk/reward scale, HipHop was high risk, high reward. As one or two engineers were working on these things, it became clear that HipHop was the right solution, but there was a lot of testing and comparing… Test it, iterate, and code wins. We look at these projects logically.”

Of course, a company built by engineers would place logic at the forefront of every decision, even the decision on whether or not a piece of software should be made publicly available and shareable.

“Companies can see those pieces [of software] as far more core to their business,” said Recordon. “But our ability to serve PHP faster is not core to our business. But cheaper/faster development tools for other companies is a real competitive advantage.” Hence, logic dictates that because there’s no business loss if Facebook’s infrastructure is open-sourced, then open-sourced it should be.

The future of open source

But there’s more to open-source at Facebook than just its back-end software and PHP optimizations; with the Open Compute Project, Facebook is also trying to open-source its server and data center design, and it’s also thinking about what open-source means for data and APIs.

“I think it’s pretty clear there’s no question about whether companies should be using open-source software or not,” said Recordon. “That was answered over the past decade. The question now is about open hardware. Many of the things that we have today for OSS we don’t have for hardware and standards.

“The world continues to shift from open source being just about the code of the software to the APIs and data above it to the hardware below it.”

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Filed under: Business, Dev