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Except it isn't internal only. Many of Facebook's tools are open sourced. And not in the "throw it over the wall" sense. Their open sourced projects tend to gai
by indygreg2 12y ago
Except it isn't internal only. Many of Facebook's tools are open sourced. And not in the "throw it over the wall" sense. Their open sourced projects tend to gain traction and get a significant amount of community contributors. By turning a number of their core tools into successful open source projects, they are leveraging the community effect to lesson the ongoing maintenance burden for these projects.
Yes, they are paying a high initial cost to develop these offerings. But since they tend to produce high quality products that attract nearly-free-to-Facebook labor via open source, the investment tends to pays off in the long run. It's a savvy business move. And one that can arguably only be pulled off by a talented engineer organization.
- larsberg 12y ago> Yes, they are paying a high initial cost to develop these offerings. I certainly agree that for organizations who can afford these high initial costs internally this is a great development model. My challenge (as a manager at Mozilla) is that, given we don't have such resources available, how do we build partnerships with groups or other projects that do in order to ensure such offerings are built? Of course, another interesting approach would be to say that GitHub, Travis, Heroku, etc. show that DevOps-as-company is a viable business model and really what we should be doing is spinning up companies that raise funding and build products around each of the areas that are still lacking products that serve enterprises (read: customers with money) today.