Facebook OSS License Policy with Joel Marcey, Michael Cheng, and Kathy Kam

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Open source policy has become a business issue as well as a political one.

Businesses like Elastic, MongoDB (the company), and Redis Labs have started to view the open source licenses of the projects they work on as a means for business defensibility against cloud providers offering similar services. It remains to be seen how viable this strategy will be for the commercial open source vendors.

Companies that do not directly sell commercial open source are also grappling with questions around open source licensing. Facebook has become a force in the open source world through projects like React and GraphQL. Facebook leads these projects, but Facebook is not monetizing them other than to the extent that they use the projects to build Facebook.com.

Facebook’s incentives are aligned with the rest of the industry on the quality of the GraphQL and React projects. Proper licensing can help Facebook keep those incentives in alignment.

Joel Marcey, Michael Cheng, and Kathy Kam from Facebook join me for a discussion of the state of open source licensing, and how that impacts Facebook.

Transcript

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