Facebook Makes Friends With Open Source Apache Foundation

The Apache Software Foundation announced Jan. 12 that Facebook has become the latest Gold Sponsor of the organisation.

Jim Jagielski, chairman of the open-source champion, said in a statement, “Sponsoring the ASF helps us [the ASF] grow existing projects, incubate new initiatives, promote community development, host user events, expand our outreach and provide the infrastructure that keeps the Foundation running on a day-to-day basis. We are grateful for the generous support of Facebook as Gold Sponsors.”

The announcement continued: “Facebook joins ASF Platinum Sponsors Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!; Gold Sponsor Hewlett-Packard; Silver Sponsors Progress Software and SpringSource/VMware; and Bronze Sponsors BlueNog, Intuit, Joost, and Matt Mullenweg.”

According to ASF documentation, Platinum Sponsors must donate $100,000 (£62,000) annually to the ASF, Gold Sponsors donate $40,000, Silver Sponsors donate $20,000, and Bronze Sponsors donate $5,000.

In his statement, Jagielski also said: “With Open Source in its DNA, Facebook is an enthusiastic champion and active contributor to the ASF, including the Hive subproject of Apache Hadoop, as well as the popular incubating projects Thrift and Cassandra—all originally developed at Facebook.”

Meanwhile, in a 12 Jan. post on the Facebook Developer Blog, David Recordon, senior open programs manager at Facebook, said:

“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. In that time, we’ve open sourced more than 20 different technologies, and scaled Facebook to reach over 350 million people around the world. 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.”

Recordon then described the open-source projects Facebook has contributed to ASF in more detail, adding: “If you read our engineering blog, you’ll know that it’s not possible to scale a site like Facebook simply by sharding your databases, but rather [it] takes a combination of specialized technologies. Open source allows us not just to make technologies like memcached scale beyond its original intent, but to release technologies like Thrift for others to build upon as well.”

Moreover, Recordon said Thrift, Hive, and Cassandra “join about 20 different technologies we’ve released as open source, including Scribe, Tornado, a new JavaScript Connect library and Three20 for iPhone development. We’re excited to continue working on great open-source projects and to support the ASF with funding, source code and developers. There’s plenty more to come.”