HipHop and You Don't Stop - Facebook Understands Open Source
Last night Facebook hosted an event at which they disclosed details about their "source code transformer" named HipHop. HipHop has some great potential for large-scale PHP web sites. Facebook claims somewhere around 50% speed improvements for common page browsing which is significant when you consider the amount of traffic that Facebook receives. This technology won't be useful to everyone, but I'm excited to see how people will adapt it for their large (but not Facebook-large) sites.
The reason for this story is not to discuss the technical details of HipHop, but rather to look at Facebook as a case study of a company that really gets open source. It's no secret that Facebook uses a lot of open source technologies to build their site: Apache, PHP, memcache, APC, and the list goes on. Clearly Facebook has benefited as a "consumer" of open source. They've also done, in most estimations, a pretty good job at contributing back -- both with code and with funding. For example, Facebook recently became a Gold Member of the Apache Software Foundation (minimum: $40K annually). But the release of HipHop, not only the code, but the way in which they went about announcing shows that they fundamentally understand open source.
Last night, we got a live video feed of an event at Facebook to announce HipHop and give the developers a chance to talk in some detail about the project. They even set aside time for Q&A at the end of the session. I wasn't in attendance, but along with around 3,000 others (according to the ustream stats) I was watching via the web. One of the main points that I took away from the event is that Facebook has no intention of "throwing the code over a wall"; they plan to continue development in the open now that HipHop is running on roughly 90% of Facebook's web servers. This is one of the key ideas known to companies that are able to successfully use open source: sharing code which benefits others will in-turn eventually bring back benefit to you.
By allowing other people to use (and improve upon!) HipHop, Facebook will indeed benefit greatly. The project now stands a chance to gain some momentum outside of Facebook: The more users that rely upon it, the more features will be added and the more bugs will be found and addressed. By investing some up-front time developing the code and by dedicating developer time on maintaining the project in the open source community, Facebook hopes to save itself a ton of internal developer time in the long run. Had they kept this code internal, it would just become one more strain on their development resources. I'm amazed that more companies aren't able to connect the dots on how open source can work to their benefit.