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Amber O’Neil
BA 310-JD1
October 10, 2015
Open Source and Data are the Way for Facebook
Facebook, founded in 2004, is a social media site whose mission is to “give people the
power to share and make the world more open and connected. People use Facebook to stay
connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and
express what matters to them” (Investor Relations, 2015). However, the process of
accomplishing that is an astronomical task that continually drives Facebook to find better ways
of doing business and keep its shareholders happy. With 2,814,554,926 shares outstanding,
Facebook has a lot of investors watching to ensure success in that task (Investor Relations,
2015).
To build an online presence such as Facebook, that generates 570 billion page views and
3 billion photo uploads per month, the organization customizes open source software through
PHP, Linux and MySQL, among others (Tech Blog, June 18, 2010). In fact, Facebook uses open
source just as it should, to “modify the source code,” and thereby evolve the product to suit the
individual and varied needs of Facebook (Marakas, p. 157). PHP, the acronym for Hypertext
Preprocessor, “is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially
suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML” (SunshinePHP, 2016). Facebook
uses this open source PHP programming but has also “built a compiler for it so it can be turned
into native code on its web servers, thus boosting performance” (Tech Blog, June 18, 2010).
Additionally, Facebook has optimized Linux, “an [open source] operating system…that relays
instructions for an application…to the computer’s processor,” to improve multiple services,
especially network throughput (Linux Foundation, 2015). Furthermore, Facebook uses MySQL,
an “open source Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) that uses Structured Query
Language…for adding, assessing and managing content in a database” (Google, 2015).
However, they use this “primarily as a key-value persistent storage”, preferring to move logic
functions onto web servers where optimizations are easier to perform. While these are the basis
of Facebook, the organization uses a multitude of other program resources, primarily open
source, for additional functions and features, such as Haystack for photo management or
Memcached for memory caching (Tech Blog, June 18, 2010).
Facebook didn’t stop at open source software, however, and instead extended that further
into what it calls open hardware. The organization custom designed its own hardware, including
