Emerging Technologies
Facebook fbOpen is almost a big deal.
TechCrunch confirmed the much anticipated news about Facebook open source initiative. Today it became official and code is now available on Facebook website.
Promptly downloaded tar file and planning to dig later on. High level read says this is a good and necessary move. There is lot of useful code bundled in that tar file. Thrift is also bundled so that's a great news.
Most interesting part of this release was the choice of open source license. Facebook picked controversial CPAL license for this codebase. CPAL is a modified version of Mozilla license (which is something open source purists recommend). It comes with two limitations (and these are big limitations in network delivered service model of Web2.0/SaaS) -
That network deployment, or making modifications available over the network, counts as distribution, which makes the license appropriate for Web services.
In plain language this means any code you modify and deploy over network becomes a candidate for same license distribution. Fair deal for most purpose but it dampens enthusiasm for developers. It increases legal cost and puts a big question mark over what-if etc etc!
That's why I think this announcement is almost a big deal.
You can read FAQ for full detail:
Blog Attachments
facebook_open_platform_release_notes.pdf (PDF, 409K)
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