How does Facebook push the next wave of open source?

June 23 News, no longer questioned: Facebook has become the world's largest open source company. Previously, Facebook had led a trend through data centers, databases and various open-source designs. This week, the company launched two more Open-source projects: The Wedge network switch and the Fboss operating system it uses. This puts Facebook on the top of the open source.

But does this also ring the bell of the Open-source company? After all, with companies like Facebook, Google (Weibo) and LinkedIn offering a lot of open source code, do other companies that specialize in selling Open-source software have room to live?

Perspective new Software Factory

Open source advocate Eric? Erid Raymond, in a book published in 2001 by the Cathedral and market (the cathedral and the Bazaar), notes that most software is used rather than sold. However, most of our attention is focused on software vendors because we are focused on the contention between Oracle and IBM, or between SAP and Microsoft.

Red Hat Open source business President Michael? Timan, Michael Tiemann, said in 2009 that while these are 1 billion-dollar-level software companies, the Open-source community's software, as well as software developed in-house, is worth as much as $ trillions of.

While almost all software has been limited by short-sighted proprietary mandates, this trend has begun to change. Internet giants such as Facebook are already aware of the immense value of open code. First-class developers want to use first-class code, and more and more first-class code has adopted the open source model.

So while Netflix is ostensibly a streaming video company, it regularly organizes open source technology activities at its headquarters to attract developers through Open-source code. Still, Netflix announced this week that it would take down the public API (application programming Interface) project.

All this is commendable, after all, the more open source the better. But in all of the open source software developed and released by such companies, there is not much that can be effectively supported, leading to delays in gaining popularity among mainstream corporate users.

Lack of sustained support

The Apache Cassandra Project is a good example, and Facebook developed the project in 2008 to open its source code to support its messaging system. Two years later, Facebook went ahead. As the company continues to improve the messaging system, they have been converted from Cassandra to HBase:

"In 2008, we opened up the Cassandra source code, which is a final consistency key-value storage solution that has been used to provide traffic services for Inbox search. Our operations and database teams have extensive knowledge of managing and operating MySQL, so abandoning any of these technologies requires careful consideration. We either abandon Cassandra Investments or provide training to our operations teams to support new large systems. ”

"We spent weeks designing a test framework to evaluate MySQL, Apache Cassandra, Apache HBase, and two other systems. We finally chose HBase. Ultimately, MySQL does not handle long tail data well, and performance declines as indexes and datasets expand. We found that Cassandra's final consistency pattern would be difficult to reconcile with our latest messages infrastructure. ”

In other words, Facebook doesn't use the technology just because it's developed by itself. Just like the former Facebook engineer Steven? "Facebook is pragmatic about what tools to use," said Grimm. Cassandra is our own development, but when we choose the way to store data for the new features of our web site, it doesn't help much. It is only when we make decisions about other issues, such as maintainability, that we consider the factor of autonomous development. ”

This is a good thing for Facebook, but it may not be good for companies such as Netflix and Cisco that already use Cassandra technology. This is especially true for mainstream companies, who crave the stability that Facebook cannot give because Facebook does not offer open source software support services.

Open Source company demand is still

Because of this, the "open source" era has just begun, far from over. Each release of an Open-source project by Facebook and its peers must have a corresponding enterprise providing ongoing maintenance and code support.

While "Every company must be a software company" is a cliché, in reality most companies are far from reaching that goal. Even companies that are core competitive in software development may not have enough energy to maintain every open source project they use. In view of this, in addition to the development of open source software companies, there must be some dedicated to provide support for enterprises.

Cassandra is a good example: DataStax has provided business support and is continuing to develop the code, and is hosted by the Apache Software Foundation. But there are a number of similar examples. Hadoop, for example, was originally developed by Yahoo and is now supported by organizations such as Hortonworks and Cloudera. Lucene originally by Yahoo's Doug? Katyn (Doug Cutting) has been developed and is now supported by Elasticsearch and Lucidworks.

We have entered the Golden age of open source software. The most attractive and significant trend in computing is driven by Open-source software, whether it is a smartphone operating system, an enterprise-wide cloud-computing infrastructure, or today's increasingly popular data technology. Although many Open-source software is not developed by software companies, support services are provided by software companies.