Facebook has partnered with a raft of other technology firms to help improve open source software and increase its acceptance.
The project involved not just Facebook but Google, Twitter and a host of other firms. Dubbed TODO, which means "talk openly, develop openly", the project aims to address challenges encountered in consuming open source software and running open source programs, according to a blog post by Facebook's James Pearce.
"We'll have more to share about our plans in the coming weeks, but our overall goal in this collaboration is to make open source easier for everyone," said Pearce.
"We want to run better, more impactful open source programs in our own companies; we want to make it easier for people to consume the technologies we open source; and we want to help create a roadmap for companies that want to create their own open source programs but aren't sure how to proceed," he said.
Among the other participants in the group are Box, Dropbox, GitHub, Khan Academy, Stripe, Square and Walmart Labs. A website has also been set up at todogroup.org. The group was announced at the @Scale conference earlier in the week.
Pearce said he hoped more firms would join the group over the next few weeks.
In a related development, Facebook said it would also open source its memcached protocol router, Mcrouter. In a blog post, the firm said at massive scale, mcrouter handles close to five billion requests per second. The protocol is currently used by the social network to handle all traffic between its caching servers.
"We believe it will help many sites scale more easily by leveraging Facebook's knowledge about large-scale systems in an easy-to-understand and easy-to-deploy package," it said.
