Facebook to share the technology 'behind its servers'

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Facebook announced Thursday it will begin to share some of the technology from their social network. The company indicated it would like to share specifications and design documents to help startups and to support innovation. Facebook hopes that they will be able to benefit from the innovations of others.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, announced the company's "Open Compute Project" at an event held for reporters at the company's headquarters in Palo Alto, California.

Facebook will not directly make any money from the new project. However, by making the designs of its servers open source, the company hopes others will find ways to improve them. They can then incorporate those advances into their own servers. Anything that can make Facebook's servers run more efficiently provides a major benefit for the company.

More efficient servers will also drive down utility costs for the social media giant, which relies on massive data centers around the United States to keep its operations going.

Facebook says it is already working with manufacturers, including Dell, that are manufacturing servers based on its designs. Some new servers are already available.

Have an opinion on this story? Share it!

Sources

The Associated Press. "Facebook to open up technology behind its servers" — Business Week, April 7, 2011
The Associated Press. "Facebook says it wants to boost innovation, opens up technology behind its servers" — The Washington Post, April 7, 2011
Barbara Ortutay and Rachel Metz. "To boost innovation, Facebook opens server designs" — Yahoo News, April 7, 2011

Share this:

This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable.

Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.

Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.

Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.

Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.

The text of this article is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License