How Medieval-Style Guilds Will Remake the Tech Behind Facebook and Google

In his native England, James Pearce says, the guilds are everywhere.

Drawing on a practice that dates back to medieval times, a guild is a group of craftspeople or merchants whove banded together because they all do the same thing. One guild is for vintners, another for masons, and so on. There are hundreds of guilds across England, Pearce says, and each provides a way for craftspeople to share certain tricks of their craft. The members of a guild come together, he explains, to figure out how best to run their trades, to hone their operations in ways they couldnt hone them on their own.

So, when Pearce was named the head of open source at Facebook, charged with overseeing the vast collection of open source software that helps run one of the largest online operations on earth, he felt that something was missing. When I took over the Facebook open source portfolio, I was waiting for the invite, he says. I was like: Is someone going to invite me to the open source guild?

This is played for laughs. But Pearce felt a very real need for something akin to an open source software guild, so much so that he and Facebook have now started one. Known as TODO, this new group made its debut yesterday at an event for hardcore web engineers hosted by Facebook, and it spans some of the biggest names in tech, including Google, Twitter, Dropbox, and GitHub. In one sense, this is a small thing. But in the long run, given the egalitarian nature of open source software, it could benefit practically any company that relies on computer code.

A backronym for talk openly, develop openly, TODO aspires to fine tune the world of open source software, so that companies can more easily build online services for the modern ageand more easily share the tools they use to build such services. The hope is that this new-age guild will create a kind of feedback loop that will significantly expand the use of open source software, software thats freely available to everyone.

This group wants to help make open source better, Pearce says. And its in a position to do so. Today, the most important open source tools emerge from the online companies like Facebook, companies building software to solve problems no one else has ever faced.

There are many cross-company organizations focused on promoting open source software, including The Linux Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation, and the Free Software Foundation. But these are rather different from TODO. An independent organization like The Linux Foundation is a non-profit that oversees the development of particular open source software tools, such as the Linux operating system, the OS used to run so many of todays web services. By contrast, TODO is meant to help companies like Facebook and Google manage how they use of open source software and how they run their own their own open source projectsprojects that freely share the custom software theyve created to run their online operations.

Facebook, for instance, uses a wide range of seasoned open source software tools, from Linux to the MySQL database. But it has also built a wide range of tools needed to operate its worldwide social network, including everything from new databases to new tools for executing software code, and it has open sourced many of these, hoping that others can use them tooand help improve them by submitting additional code. With TODO, the company hopes to streamline how this software is shared with the larger world and, in the long run, ensure it get used by more people.

As Pearce explains, running an open source project isnt an easy thing. Facebook produces new software code for its own online empire on a daily basis, and it cant just lob this code onto the internet for others to use. Basically, Facebook needs are somewhat different from other companiesfor one thing, it moves at a much faster paceand that means it must develop additional tools for testing and managing code that gets shared online. This is hard problem, he says. But TODO, he believes, can help make it easier.

TODO isnt something the world of open source has seen before, says Chris Kelly, the head of open source at GitHub. This is somewhere in a new space that doesnt really exist yet, he says. Its a new domain for usa new wave for open source. The organization is still working out how it will operate. But the basic idea is thatrather than continually building new tools for using, testing, and sharing open source softwarethese companies can freely trade practices with each other. We just dont want to re-invent the wheel many times, Kelly says.

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How Medieval-Style Guilds Will Remake the Tech Behind Facebook and Google