14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook isn't exactly known for its open approach, recent privacy changes notwithstanding, but, at least on the software side, it has been working towards giving more back to the development community. Its most recent move in that direction is becoming a Gold sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation, the organization that fosters some of the web's most important open-source technologies including the HTTP server from which it derives its name.
"From the day Mark Zuckerberg started building Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004, the site has been built on common open source software such as Linux, Apache, memcached, MySQL, and PHP," David Recordon, Facebook's senior open programs manager writes. "Today we are pleased to announce that we are becoming a Gold sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), which has been instrumental in fostering open source adoption and providing structure to build successful open source communities."
The social network will donate $40,000 per year to the foundation which is what it takes to become a Gold sponsor. Facebook says it owes a lot to the open-source community and the technologies it developed and adds that, even as it is now one of the biggest websites in the world and certainly one of the most heavily solicited, it still uses a majority of open-source tools, which it has developed upon, for its infrastructure.
The company has created or contributed to over 20 open-source projects, notable ones being the Thrift framework, Hive, a project it memcached, and Cassandra. Recently, it has also open-sourced a real-time web framework dubbed Tornado, based on some of the FriendFeed technologies it acquired along with the company. Facebook now joins Hewlett-Packard as an Apache Gold sponsor. The sponsorship itself doesn't entitle the company to more than its logo on the foundation's website and recognition for the deed. Then again, it wouldn't be a donation if there was too much more. There is, however, a higher level of sponsorship and $100,000 will get you a Platinum sponsor badge. If Facebook would have dug a little deeper in its, increasingly deep, pockets, it might have joined the ranks of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, which all have the title.