What a difference a year makes. I won't get too mushy-faced on this one, but Facebook's platform just celebrated its one-year anniversary. The past 12 months have completely changed the face of online social networking, in large part due to Facebook opening up its platform, and others following suit. Facebook is taking the opportunity to use its anniversary celebration to launch the next stage of its open platform strategy: open source.
Brief History of Facebook's "Openness"
Since opening its platform last May, Facebook has since offered a licensed version of its platform for other networks, and has also launched Facebook Connect, which has resulted in some underwhelming complications given the current "open network" environment. So in typical Facebook fashion (that is, an insatiable need to be among the first to the table), Facebook is open-sourcing a great deal of its Facebook Platform. This includes "most of the code that runs Facebook's Platform plus implementations of many of the most-used methods and tags," according to a statement from Facebook.
Facebook and the Developer Community
This is a first step for Facebook, and it will really be up to the developer community to make the open source option shine. There are built in extensibility points, so added functionality can be incorporated into whatever renditions of the code you'd like to use. You can download the source code here.
Licensed under the Common Public Attribution License, the open-sourcing of Facebook's platform is focused on the community approach for development and implementation, as well as direct capabilities to connect brands with Facebook's, for whatever purpose necessary. It's also important to note that the rest of the code is licensed under the Mozilla Public License.
Will Facebook Open Source Help Global Adoption of its Licensed Platform?