Marco Arment’s theory on why Facebook “open sourced” their data center design via the Open Compute Project makes a lot of sense to me:
My best guess is that this is primarily for recruiting engineering talent. There’s no shortage of engineers, but there’s always a shortage of great ones, especially in Silicon Valley. Google has been a talent vacuum for a long time since it’s so appealing for most engineers to work there.
With this move, I think Facebook is telling the geek world that they’re just as big and serious of a tech company as Google, and if you want to work on large-scale, interesting engineering challenges that affect hundreds of millions of people, you should work at Facebook.
April 13, 2011 at 6:12 pm
They’re also telling you that you might get to work on things that get public recognition. It’s no use building ENIAC if you can’t tell anyone about it.
April 18, 2011 at 1:23 am
I smell a contradiction here. If you are only looking for engineering talent, why do you call it ‘open’? ‘Open’ means anyone with an aptitude towards solving engineering challenges, not just engineers by way of acadmeic qualification.