Are you a Facebook user? If so, the company delivered the significant news today that it is open sourcing parts of its Facebook Platform, with the open offerings dubbed fbOpen. Over on Ostatic, our sister blog dedicated to open source, you’ll find an analysis of the news and a good analysis from Mike Gunderloy of the unusual open source license Facebook has chosen.

As opposed to opening up its entire platform, Facebook has chosen to open “a significant part” up. This includes most of the code used to run Facebook Platform, including the REST API, FBML parser, FQL parser, and FBJS sanitizer and proxy, along with implementations of many common tags and methods. There’s more to the story.
Facebook officials say that they want to make it easier to build applications, “whether it’s by running your own test servers, building tools, or optimizing your applications on this technology.” There are extensibility options made available, so developers can add their own tags and API methods. Facebook also says that it will release more code in the future.
There is analysis on OStatic of how much of this move is marketing-driven by Facebook, and how much of it is a response to OpenSocial, but there is no question that the news is generally good for web workers who use Facebook. It will usher in many new applications, and these are likely to be developed on an ongoing basis, as Facebook has confirmed that it will deliver more code. Developers and applications users should get to know the components of the unusual open source license that Facebook has gone with, though. Find more on that here.
Do you think Facebook’s move will bring useful new applications?
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