The Clouds were built with open source.
What’s now Meta Platforms got its start not with the “social network” of Facebook, but with the Open Compute Project. It’s an open source platform for building hyperscale data centers at minimal cost.
Thanks to Open Compute, Meta owns its own infrastructure. It also has thousands of programmers on staff, whose job it is to bring traffic to that infrastructure. But even with Threads, Meta didn’t forget where it came from.
Threads is being built to support ActivityPub, the open source system behind Mastodon and what’s called the Fediverse.
Each Mastodon server will shortly have a choice, whether to connect to or “federate” with Threads. Some will. Some won’t. If you don’t like the decision of your instance’s admin, you can choose another instance that meets your needs. Or you can set up your own.
In short, you don’t need Threads. Its only advantage is its scale since it will use Meta infrastructure. That’s also its disadvantage. It’s being built to collect data and monetize it. Mastodon isn’t.
The degree to which Cloud Czars like Meta and its four peers – Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon – support the open source ethos they’re built on is always an open question. They will go back-and-forth on it, adding support here, withholding it there, based on their own business requirements.
That’s the way open source is designed to work.
Open source is different from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Licenses like the GPL require sharing of improvements. Other licenses, called “permissive” by their sponsors, don’t require it. You can take this open source, tweak it, then sell the tweaks or even hide them, which FOSS does not allow. The word “permissive” in this context applies only to the company taking the code.
What I’ve learned in 18 years covering open source is that no company’s promises in this area are worth the digital ink they’re printed on. The only open source I trust is code that comes from a Foundation created to hold the code, one that is separate from any creator of it. Like the Fediverse Foundation. Oracle won the right to make open source proprietary, and this power has since been used countless times, to pull the rug out from under developers and users.
Even if a company claims to be 100% open source, that company can be bought, as Red Hat was bought by IBM. Corporate open source promises are pie crust promises. Meta’s promises to ActivityPub are pie crust promises.
Open source needs to be a bigger piece of the discussion around Threads, around Twitter, and around the business of technology generally. But 99% of the reports I’ve seen about the new service ignore it.
Fortunately, you now know about it. You should educate yourself about it. And you should be on guard about open source issues in the future.
