Facebook prepares open source assault

Facebook has indicated plans to release much more of its internally developed software under open source as part of its contribution to the wider community.

The social media giant released its third major open source library over the weekend; a library of C++ components dubbed 'Folly' that promise faster performance than equivalents found elsewhere.

Jordan DeLong, a software engineer at the company, said the components are designed to be used in heavy production environments across the thousands of systems that serve Facebook’s 900 million users.

But DeLong said the library's release under open source was a gateway to releasing much more of its internally developed software, as it became a "clear bottleneck".

"Any [new] open sourced project needed to break dependencies on unreleased internal library code," he said.

Facebook uses other open source projects for its development, including MySQL database and PHP scripting language.

It has previously released other internally developed software, including the HipHop PHP compiler, the Thrift scalable service sharing framework and Cassandra, a distributed database management system amongst others.

The Folly library can be found on Github and more components will be added as they’re written, according to DeLong.