Facebook to go open source

Facebook is planning a strategic move by turning its platform into an open source project, says IT Examiner.

With this, any social network will become Facebook compatible. This will allow developers to change the Facebook components for their own use and deploy them on their Web sites, and help developers to build richer applications.

This is seen as a reaction to Open Social, which is backed by Google, MySpace and Yahoo. Open Social is also an open source platform, run by the Open Social Foundation. Facebook will soon release additional details.

Nasa is developing an open source project called CosmosCode aimed at providing a common access point for individuals, academics, companies, and space agencies around the world using, contributing to, or supporting re-usable, modular, extensible, or standards-driven space exploration software, states CNET.com.

The project aims to explore the cost-benefit of leveraging the free and open source development process for projects that normally costs millions of dollars in development and testing.

It will also encourage private industry to create products and services which leverage and extend Nasa's investments, extending its applicability and relevance to the commercial sector.

Open source and higher education have a long and storied history. BSD Unix originally came from the University of California at Berkeley, and Linux was created while Linus Torvalds was a student at the University of Helsinki, reports Internet News.

Yet new research from Gartner indicates that open source is taking hold in universities in more areas than ever before, a fact supported by a string of wins from commercial open source vendor GroundWork.

This week, the systems monitoring software company boasted in a release that it signed 18 leading universities worldwide as customers.