Industry-Based ToDo Alliance Wants To Guide FOSS Development

jeremy · 09-16-2014, 10:52 AM

Quote:

The combined force of cloud computing and mobile devices is changing our world, putting nearly infinite amounts of machine intelligence into billions of hands and millions of businesses.

Now this force is also changing the way the entire infrastructure is built, including the devices themselves.

Representatives of Facebook on Monday announced the formation of a group, the TODO Project, intended to streamline the way open-source software projects, a big part of cloud and mobile computing, are executed. This may include such things as best practices for updating open-source software, ways of securing legal compliance, or tools and habits for making software that is freely available to anyone.

“There is a problem here we all feel is not getting better anytime soon,” said Jay Parikh, global head of engineering at Facebook. “We feel there is a speed at which things have to move.”

At first blush, the effort might seem like the further corporate control of one of the most important technologies of this era. That may be so, but it is more importantly a sign of just how critical that technology has become, and how its growing importance needs to be managed in ways that are more expedient, clear and consistent than was possible in the movement’s early days.

Members of TODO, which stands for “talk openly, develop openly,” include Google and Walmart’s online operations, along with GitHub, the primary repository for working on open-source projects, and Khan Academy, a nonprofit online educational organization. Other members are Twitter, Box, Dropbox, Stripe and Square.

More at the NY Times...

What do LQ members think of the ToDo Alliance?

--jeremy