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"Our job is not to just build Facebook, our job is to make the world more open and connected — and we in Product Infrastructure are tasked with giving the whole
by natrius 11y ago
"Our job is not to just build Facebook, our job is to make the world more open and connected — and we in Product Infrastructure are tasked with giving the whole software industry the tools to help us accomplish this mission."
If this is explicitly true, I've never heard of anything like it in a company that doesn't sell to engineering organizations, and it's pretty amazing.
- birdsbolt 11y agoI did chuckle as it reminded me of the "curing cancer" talk Gavin Belson gives in the Silicon Valley series :D
- ams6110 11y agoThey built their company on tools like this, so they do have a certain moral obligation to give back. I don't like a lot of things about Facebook, but good for them having this attitude.
- benihana 11y ago>so they do have a certain moral obligation to give back. What moral obligation are you talking about? There's no moral obligation for anyone using open source software to give anything back. Are you aware of how software licenses work?
- ObviousScience 11y agoIf you're referring to software license terms, you're making a legal, not a moral argument.
- Stratoscope 11y agoThere's an interesting nuance in the phrase "a certain moral obligation." In my understanding, it's a fairly weak statement [1], somewhat akin to "People will think more highly of you if you do this thing, and less highly if you don't." Contrast this with "they have a moral obligation." To me that is a much stronger statement: "People will think you are behaving in an immoral way if you do not do this thing." It's funny how adding the word "certain" to the phrase actually makes it a less certain, gentler way of putting things - quite the opposite of the literal meaning of the word. Put another way, I could imagine a law being passed to enforce "a moral obligation". But it seems much less likely to have a law enforcing something described as "a certain moral obligation." [1] I mean "weak" in the sense of not being a strong claim of obligation, not "weak" in the sense that the phrase is a poor way to say something.
- ams6110 11y agoRight, I just meant in a "pay it forward" or "the decent thing to do" sense.
- leebyron 11y agoHey, original author here. The moral obligation is real, and I personally feel quite strongly about it and I know most of my coworkers feel the same. Morality is relevant because it's a human feeling. It's easy to forget that even big companies like Facebook make decisions by the hands of single individuals. Facebook was built on the LAMP stack >10 years ago. Without open source, Facebook wouldn't exist and we all know that. I personally find satisfaction in sharing as much of the stuff we build as possible as open source in the hopes that others will be able to build something great.
- cosmolev 11y agoOpen? Connected? BS! Or they mean "Connected to Facebook alone"?