Facebook And Partners Establish Group To Promote Open Source Projects

A number of Web organisations, including Facebook, Google, Box, Dropbox, Github, Khan Academy and Twitter, have launched TODO – an industry group that wants to use its members’ expertise to help others run open source projects.

“We will be sharing experiences, developing best practices, and working on common tooling,” explains the statement on the TODO website.

The announcement was made at @Scale, a technical conference for engineers held in San Francisco.

Do like I do

TODO is a backronym for “talk openly, develop openly”. Not many details have been revealed, but the group is likely to be helping interested parties implement open source solutions like those included in the OpenStack and OpenCompute projects.

Facebook founded OpenCompute in 2011 to openly share data centre designs, and the initiative has since been joined by organisations including Intel, Rackspace and Microsoft.

TODO is quick to stress it’s not just another open source foundation. “Our overall goal in this collaboration is to make open source easier for everyone,” said James Pearce, head of Open Source at Facebook.

“We want to run better, more impactful open source programs in our own companies; we want to make it easier for people to consume the technologies we open source; and we want to help create a roadmap for companies that want to create their open source programs but aren’t sure how to proceed.”

TODO is currently recruiting more participants – interested parties can apply for membership on the organisation’s website.

The announcement was made as Facebook released yet another one of its internal projects into the public domain. The freshly open-sourced ‘mcrouter’ (pronounced ‘mick-router’) is a memcached protocol router that the company uses to turn its database caches into a distributed system.

“We believe it will help many sites scale more easily by leveraging Facebook’s knowledge about large-scale systems in an easy-to-understand and easy-to-deploy package,” said the company in a statement.

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