14 DAY TRIAL // Open source is a global and mainstream phenomenon today after being on the fringes for quite a while. And it's not just in programming, many aspects of society have been changed, hopefully for the better, by the concepts and principles put forth by open-source software advocates. Big and traditionally very closed companies like IBM or even Microsoft are embracing open-source, with a degree of reluctance in some cases, but it's the small companies that have benefited from it the most.
Startups don't have the kind of money to license expensive proprietary technologies so they use free and frequently open-source (the terms aren't interchangeable) ones. One of those startups, Twitter, is now giving back to the community or at least expressing its gratitude with a directory listing all the open-source projects it's working on now.
The recently launched page lists all of the open-source software projects and technologies Twitter is either actively working on or has contributed to. It's quite a sizeable list spanning several programming languages - Ruby, Scala, Java and even C/C++. For all the projects listed, Twitter offers a short description of its contributions plus a link to the Twitter profiles of the actual developers that worked on them accompanied by their avatars.
There are some big names in there, like multiple contributions to Cassandra, Facebook distributed database and storage project, or Memcached, and some Twitter-oriented projects as well. In fact, 22 out of the 29 projects listed have been developed originally by Twitter. Clearly, the startup believes in open-source software but, just to make it 100 percent clear, makes a very strong statement at the top of the page, "Twitter loves open source. Twitter is built on open-source software - here are the projects we have released or contributed to."
There's another purpose for the page, rather than just listing Twitter's contributions, it also acts as hiring pitch enticing developers who'd want to work on projects like those to check out the open positions at the company still on a hiring spree despite having added a big number of people in the past few months already.