A look inside Facebook's open source program

Open source becomes more ubiquitous every year, appearing everywhere from government municipalities to universities. Companies of all sizes are also increasingly turning to open source software. In fact, some companies are taking open source a step further by supporting projects financially or working with developers.

Facebook's open source program, for example, encourages others to release their code as open source, while working and engaging with the community to support open source projects. Christine Abernathy, a Facebook developer, open source advocate, and member of the company's open source team, visited the Rochester Institute of Technology last November, presenting at the November edition of the FOSS Talks speaker series. In her talk, Abernathy explained how Facebook approaches open source and why it's an important part of the work the company does.

Facebook and open source

Abernathy said that open source plays a fundamental role in Facebook's mission to create community and bring the world closer together. This ideological match is one motivating factor for Facebook's participation in open source. Additionally, Facebook faces unique infrastructure and development challenges, and open source provides a platform for the company to share solutions that could help others. Open source also provides a way to accelerate innovation and create better software, helping engineering teams produce better software and work more transparently. Today, Facebook's 443 projects on GitHub comprise 122,000 forks, 292,000 commits, and 732,000 followers.

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^{Some of the projects released as open source by Facebook, including React, GraphQL, Caffe2, and others.}

Lessons learned

Abernathy emphasized that Facebook has learned many lessons from the open source community, and it looks forward to learning many more. She identified the three most important ones:

• Share what's useful
• Highlight your heroes
• Fix common pain points

Christine Abernathy visited RIT as part of the FOSS Talks speaker series. Every month, a guest speaker from the open source world shares wisdom, insight, and advice about the open source world with students interested in free and open source software. The FOSS @ MAGIC community is thankful to have Abernathy attend as a speaker.