FOSS Force

There was absolutely nothing wrong with this year’s All Things Open conference. There were a few glitches, as might be expected, but not enough to matter. Was it perfect? Probably not. Perfection at a conference would probably be pretty boring — and boring would be a fault keeping it from being perfect, if you’ll excuse a little circular logic. Let’s just say say that ATO was more than good enough — and then a lot more.

But now it’s over, one for the record books, as they say, leaving behind memories and anticipation for 2015.

One of the things you get from a business oriented open source conference like ATO is a glimpse of how particular companies approach open source. Sometimes there’s no surprise. For example, it’s not news that the business end at Red Hat pretty much understands and respects the underlying open source philosophy. Other companies might be different. Often there’s a schism, with the suits in the front office being busy pushing proprietary wares, making plans for more data mining and the like, while the guys and gals working in the open source departments are just busy working at being good open source citizens.

I saw this last year at ATO, which is about the only opportunity I have to rub elbows with big tech. This year, I no longer raised an eyebrow when I saw good things going on and positive energy being generated by the development teams at companies with worrisome business practices. I figure this is a good thing. The suits need to be surrounded by FOSS folks. Maybe a little of that “share and share alike” philosophy will rub off.

Take Facebook, for example. There’s more going on with the social giant besides Zuckerberg and his friends being busy turning data mining into profits.

Thursday morning, one of ATO’s opening keynote speakers was James Pearce, the social network’s Head of Open Source. He spoke about another side to Facebook — a side I knew nothing about.

It seems that the company is committed to open sourcing practically everything it creates, from hardware to software. I knew about the company’s open sourcing of green hardware through the Open Compute Project, but I’d assumed the company was like many other firms, given its track record on privacy issues — happy to build infrastructures on open source and give nothing back.

Not true, according to Pearce.