Social networking giant Facebook has become a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the nonprofit group behind the Apache Web server and a growing number of other significant open source software projects.
According to an announcement that was published on the official Apache blog, Facebook has signed up for gold-level sponsorship—the second highest tier—which means that the company has committed to making an annual donation to the foundation of at least $40,000.
Facebook has a long history of supporting open source software development and has contributed code to various Apache projects, including Hadoop. Facebook has also launched several open source projects of its own, some of which are maintained in collaboration with the open source software community through the Apache Incubator program.
"Sponsoring the ASF helps us grow existing projects, incubate new initiatives, promote community development, host user events, expand our outreach, and provide the infrastructure that keeps the Foundation running on a day-to-day basis. We are grateful for the generous support of Facebook as Gold Sponsors," wrote ASF chairman Jim Jagielski in a statement. "With Open Source in its DNA, Facebook is an enthusiastic champion and active contributor to the ASF, including the Hive subproject of Apache Hadoop, as well as the popular incubating projects Thrift and Cassandra—all originally developed at Facebook."
As some readers may recall, we first covered Facebook's involvement in open source software back in 2008 shortly after the company's Thrift Web framework became a part of the Apache Incubator ecosystem. Facebook's commitment to open source has continued to evolve. The company is also outgrowing its walled garden mentality and becoming increasingly comfortable with open standards and interoperability as it embraces the efforts of DiSo and other groups that are working to enable open social networking.
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