From its efforts to reshape computing through open source to its aggressive push to increase internet connectivity around the world, Facebook is a leader in open innovation. Perhaps more important today than ever, Facebook’s focus on democratizing access to technology enhances opportunity and scale for individuals and businesses alike. That’s why we’re so excited to announce the company is joining the Linux Foundation at the highest level.
Facebook’s sponsorship of open innovation through the Linux Foundation will help support the largest shared technology investment in history with an estimated $16B in development costs of the world’s 100+ leading open source projects and supports those project communities through governance, events and education. The company is also already the lead contributor of many Linux Foundation-hosted projects, such as Presto, GraphQL, Osquery and ONNX. It has been an active participant in Linux kernel development, employing key developers and maintainers across major kernel subsystems.
In addition to these efforts, Facebook has a long history of leveraging open source to unlock the potential of open innovation:
- Through Facebook Connectivity and the open source Telecom Infra Project (TIP) Foundation, Facebook hopes to bring fast, reliable internet to those without it. Facebook’s Magma open source project allows telecom operators to easily deploy mobile networks in hard-to-reach areas — reducing the costs of building and maintaining telecom networks. Together, Facebook Connectivity and TIP have created hundreds of billions of dollars of value through open source collaboration.
- Facebook created a unique dataset of over 100,000 videos and launched the Deepfake Detection Challenge in order to accelerate development of new ways to detect deepfake videos. This open, collaborative effort will help the industry and society at large meet the challenge presented by deepfake technology and help everyone better assess the legitimacy of content they see online.
- Facebook’s Data for Good program enables geographic data to be shared with the aim of addressing some of the world’s greatest humanitarian issues, including COVID-19.
- Facebook also leads the industry in open hardware, having founded the Open Compute Project (OCP), which uses open source to enable the creation of efficient, flexible, and scalable hardware designs for data centers.
- By creating and sustaining an open source ecosystem around PyTorch, Facebook also accelerates the pace at which data scientists and developers can leverage the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning in computer vision, natural language processing, and other disciplines.
- Facebook’s React.js library powers some of the world’s most popular websites and has become the standard for frontend web development due to its simplicity and flexibility.
- In working with Github to sponsor the first-ever remote open source fellowship run by Major League Hacking, Facebook also hopes to create a trend of empowering a new generation of diverse open source contributors.
Facebook’s commitment to the open source community can be seen in both its multi-million dollar investments and its genuine passion for technology development. It is this combination that makes the company an incredible supporter of the open source developer community.
As a Platinum member of the Linux Foundation, Facebook’s Kathy Kam joins the LF board. Kathy is head of Open Source at Facebook where she manages the Open Source Engineering, Developer Advocacy, and Open Source Program Management teams. Kathy is a 20-year engineering, product management, and developer relations leader previously with Google and Microsoft.
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