Facebook just announced that it has become a Gold sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation. According to Facebook's David Recordon, the company wants to give back to the open source community that allowed Facebook to develop and contribute to projects like the Thrift framework, Hive, memcached and Cassandra. Apache Gold members donate $40,000 per year to the project. It's worth noting that this is not Apache's highest sponsorship level. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are platinum sponsors and give $100,000 per year.
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In total, Facebook has developed or contributes to over 20 open source projects. Facebook also released the real-time web framework Tornado, one of FriendFeed's core technologies, as an open source project shortly after it acquired FriendFeed in August 2009.
As Recordon notes in today's announcement, technologies like Hive and Cassandra that were first developed in-house by Facebook are now being used and sponsored by a diverse group of companies ranging from CBS and Rackspace to Digg, last.fm and Twitter.
There can be little doubt, however, that open source is, as Apache Foundation chairman Jim Jagielski puts it, "in Facebook's DNA." We can't help but wonder, though, why Facebook didn't decide to go all the way and buy the Platinum sponsorship package.
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