Facebook's Open Compute Project. Basically, they've put all their custom server and datacenter specifications on line for anyone to use. Very impressive.
Isn't this sort of the open source equivalent of greenwashing, since they otherwise control every aspect of their users' experience?
Sorry, that's an editorial disguised as a question, but I would be interested in your thoughts on this.
I just don't get it Tom. Why is controlling every aspect of user experience a bad thing? Isn't this called "designing a product"? If people want a much less sophisticated service that is not polished, is feature incomplete, and sets users adrift without any real help or direction, they are free to use other services like digitalmediatree. You can call that "freedom" if you like, and in a strange sense I would agree with you, but that's not what people want.
Facebook has incredible knowledge about how to scale web services. They are sharing that knowledge for free. Seems like a win to me. If you don't like Facebook, don't use it (as neither of us do). But why would you care about this issue, or put any effort into denigrating it? I really don't get it. Are you trying to convince me I'm wrong to be excited about a leader in my field sharing knowledge? Or hoping to convince 500 million people they've made the wrong choice by using Facebook? I think that's a pretty tall task with slim rewards.
If Facebook has any unstated reasons for allowing some of their excited hardware geeks to make this release I highly doubt it has anything to do with furthering their control over users, as this is highly technical information that will not penetrate the mainstream discourse and wouldn't be understood even if it did. I think possibly they hope other organizations will adopt their blueprint, thereby increasing economies of scale and further driving down their custom server and datacenter component prices. That would be great for me directly, and I would guess for you indirectly.
I wasn't asking if the release furthered control over users--Facebook already has that. I was asking if it was a cosmetic change to appear open source when they're not. I've been reading a lot of articles from a civil liberties perspective that are very concerned with Facebook for its record on censorship and privacy. If it's going to be the main conduit of world discourse from here on out it's everybody's business. 500 million "friends" certainly gets my attention.
I love the control you gave us here at the Tree to make our own HTML and arrange, store, and delete images (among other nice features). It seems crazy to be arguing with you that I like your site better than what I see of Zuckerberg's.
Yeah, I see what you're saying. Of course I'm no fan of Facebook. But I'm glad they exist and that so many people have this conduit for discourse. Digitalmediatree just couldn't scale to anywhere near that size. It's just not the same thing at all. Maybe this site is cool for what it does, but in the whole scheme of things it's just not even on the radar. It costs serious money to do what Facebook does and so they have to try to make some in order to run it. And that means exerting a certain amount of control including censorship to keep the community "safe" for grandma types (I obviously don't mind a bit of censorship on this site) as well as privacy intrusions so they can sell marketing data to advertisers (it's not privacy violations because they spell out what they are going to do with your data). I don't begrudge them any of that.
But I don't think this open source server/datacenter project has anything to do with polishing their image. It's just too geeky for that. They've already done the same thing on the software side, and probably nobody outside the technical community knows it. They rewrote the entire PHP runtime - HipHop - and gave it away for free. That's a very big deal! (Not to mention a ton of other projects like Tornado, a real-time web framework for python). And they don't trumpet it at all, as far as I've seen. Who would care? What's a PHP runtime?
I'm not saying they are some amazing force for good in the world. But I think they are on the whole a positive thing. It's free, and it's super simple and it connects a huge portion of the planet. Maybe when the revolution comes the government will shut it down, or censor it, or use it in some nefarious way. I understand about the In-Q-Tel funding (they don't hide it.) But I'd rather have Facebook than not have it. And the technology they give away for free along the way is just gravy, and much appreciated by people like me trying to do similar things on a much smaller scale.
Maybe I should be more skeptical about everything, but I'm just not feeling very skeptical these days.
"It's free, and it's super simple and it connects a huge portion of the planet" is how I would describe the internet. I'm actually doing OK not being on a meganetwork within the meganetwork. For a public person I like having some privacy barriers and I'm happier not having to deal with the social nuances of "pokes" and "friend requests." I like the idea of small communities like the Tree all being linked by search engines and people taking the trouble to make recommendations. Not being on Facebook is like having an unlisted phone number 40 years ago, I guess. But I don't feel as obscure and unreachable as that would have made me feel.
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- jim 4-08-2011 1:13 am
Isn't this sort of the open source equivalent of greenwashing, since they otherwise control every aspect of their users' experience?
- tom moody 4-08-2011 3:12 pm
Sorry, that's an editorial disguised as a question, but I would be interested in your thoughts on this.
- tom moody 4-08-2011 3:14 pm
I just don't get it Tom. Why is controlling every aspect of user experience a bad thing? Isn't this called "designing a product"? If people want a much less sophisticated service that is not polished, is feature incomplete, and sets users adrift without any real help or direction, they are free to use other services like digitalmediatree. You can call that "freedom" if you like, and in a strange sense I would agree with you, but that's not what people want.
Facebook has incredible knowledge about how to scale web services. They are sharing that knowledge for free. Seems like a win to me. If you don't like Facebook, don't use it (as neither of us do). But why would you care about this issue, or put any effort into denigrating it? I really don't get it. Are you trying to convince me I'm wrong to be excited about a leader in my field sharing knowledge? Or hoping to convince 500 million people they've made the wrong choice by using Facebook? I think that's a pretty tall task with slim rewards.
If Facebook has any unstated reasons for allowing some of their excited hardware geeks to make this release I highly doubt it has anything to do with furthering their control over users, as this is highly technical information that will not penetrate the mainstream discourse and wouldn't be understood even if it did. I think possibly they hope other organizations will adopt their blueprint, thereby increasing economies of scale and further driving down their custom server and datacenter component prices. That would be great for me directly, and I would guess for you indirectly.
- jim 4-08-2011 4:14 pm
I wasn't asking if the release furthered control over users--Facebook already has that. I was asking if it was a cosmetic change to appear open source when they're not. I've been reading a lot of articles from a civil liberties perspective that are very concerned with Facebook for its record on censorship and privacy. If it's going to be the main conduit of world discourse from here on out it's everybody's business. 500 million "friends" certainly gets my attention.
I love the control you gave us here at the Tree to make our own HTML and arrange, store, and delete images (among other nice features). It seems crazy to be arguing with you that I like your site better than what I see of Zuckerberg's.
- tom moody 4-09-2011 7:25 pm
Yeah, I see what you're saying. Of course I'm no fan of Facebook. But I'm glad they exist and that so many people have this conduit for discourse. Digitalmediatree just couldn't scale to anywhere near that size. It's just not the same thing at all. Maybe this site is cool for what it does, but in the whole scheme of things it's just not even on the radar. It costs serious money to do what Facebook does and so they have to try to make some in order to run it. And that means exerting a certain amount of control including censorship to keep the community "safe" for grandma types (I obviously don't mind a bit of censorship on this site) as well as privacy intrusions so they can sell marketing data to advertisers (it's not privacy violations because they spell out what they are going to do with your data). I don't begrudge them any of that.
But I don't think this open source server/datacenter project has anything to do with polishing their image. It's just too geeky for that. They've already done the same thing on the software side, and probably nobody outside the technical community knows it. They rewrote the entire PHP runtime - HipHop - and gave it away for free. That's a very big deal! (Not to mention a ton of other projects like Tornado, a real-time web framework for python). And they don't trumpet it at all, as far as I've seen. Who would care? What's a PHP runtime?
I'm not saying they are some amazing force for good in the world. But I think they are on the whole a positive thing. It's free, and it's super simple and it connects a huge portion of the planet. Maybe when the revolution comes the government will shut it down, or censor it, or use it in some nefarious way. I understand about the In-Q-Tel funding (they don't hide it.) But I'd rather have Facebook than not have it. And the technology they give away for free along the way is just gravy, and much appreciated by people like me trying to do similar things on a much smaller scale.
Maybe I should be more skeptical about everything, but I'm just not feeling very skeptical these days.
- jim 4-10-2011 6:06 pm
"It's free, and it's super simple and it connects a huge portion of the planet" is how I would describe the internet. I'm actually doing OK not being on a meganetwork within the meganetwork. For a public person I like having some privacy barriers and I'm happier not having to deal with the social nuances of "pokes" and "friend requests." I like the idea of small communities like the Tree all being linked by search engines and people taking the trouble to make recommendations. Not being on Facebook is like having an unlisted phone number 40 years ago, I guess. But I don't feel as obscure and unreachable as that would have made me feel.
- tom moody 4-12-2011 2:53 pm