What TODO with open source: Google, Facebook and Twitter launch collab project

Some of the web’s biggest users of open-source gear have thrown their weight behind a project to make open-source “easier.”

Facebook, Google and Twitter, cloud collaboration services Dropbox and Box and code site GitHub have joined payment providers Square and Stripe, US retailer’s WalMart Labs and a body called the Khan Academy to announce TODO.

An acronym for “talk openly, develop openly”, the goal of TODO is to iron out lingering and persistent problems for big firms using open source.

Namely, getting frequent and high-quality quality releases of code for the projects and packages their operations have come to rely on.

Also, working with communities and projects, and making contributions to help nudge things along.

The TODO site says the group plans to share experiences, develop best practice and work on common tooling.

However, TODO warned its primary members can’t do this alone and it has called on others using or sharing open source to join the party.

Facebook’s John Pearce said in a separate company blog said the overall goal of TODO is to make open source easier for everyone.

“We want to run better, more impactful open source programs in our own companies; we want to make it easier for people to consume the technologies we open source; and we want to help create a roadmap for companies that want to create their own open source programs but aren't sure how to proceed,” Pearce said.

More details on how the group plans to work are promised in coming weeks.

TODO’s members are huge consumers of open source: languages, the Linux kernel, middleware, databases, tools and other server software.

The giants like Facebook, Twitter and Google have been sucking in code in addition to building their own open-source gear.

For example, Google has its own Linux that's based on Ubuntu and it created MapReduce that’s been implemented as Hadoop under an Apache-license; Facebook developed the Cassandra NoSQL database now resident at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) while this summer it announced Apollo, the Paxos-like NoSQL database for hierarchical storage.

Often, such projects have come out of meeting an internal need.

TODO shows the giants feel the open-source tools they have built or the components they are sucking in aren’t developing in the wild as they’d like. And that's a problem, particularly for listed companies betting their businesses on this stuff. ®