Facebook meets an obligation of big open source consumers

It's basically Software as a Service. It's an online community.

Facebook uses a lot of open source software to deliver its service, but for it software is a means to an end, not the end itself.

Legally, Facebook has few obligations to the open source community. It could buy support, but it can also support open source code through its own people. It can contribute code, but this is only an obligation under some licenses.

A Facebook community member is not like a member of, say, the Firefox community. Facebook members don't spend hours searching for bugs in the code they use. They're more interested in talking with their friends.

But, as we saw from the failures of MySpace, reputation still matters in this space. If you act like a pirate people abandon ship.

Facebook tries to understand this (the problems of its privacy policy notwithstanding). So its decision to join the Apache Foundation is both cheap ($100,000) and clever.

What Facebook is buying here is credibility. Apache Software Foundation chairman Jim Jagielski's blog post is heartfelt, pointing out how Apache projects Thrift and Cassandra started at Facebook.

By committing to Apache, Facebook also gets some Wall Street cred. Apache is not copyleft. It's a collection of businesses, contributing code in a businesslike way. It's a serious group for serious people.

And now look at who Apache's top sponsors are. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook. For CEO Mark Zuckerberg, still only 25, that must be a nice sentence to read.