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Comment by matchagaucho | Hacker News Reader

FB open sourced their infrastructure. Anyone can lift these designs and build their data centers using identical specs.

http://www.opencompute.org/wiki/Server/SpecsAndDesigns

I think both points are true: FB does want to be the Internet, but they also realize that the path to that endgame lies in capturing (and driving) behavior, not in building infrastructure.

The latter is just a necessary tool. But, you're not going to threaten FB 's mission by simply building out an identical (or even superior) infrastructure. So, there's virtually zero-risk to them in open-sourcing it.

...which gives you a moderately-expensive pile of laser-focused hardware and nothing to run on it. Far less than half the infrastructure story.

(Not that I'm criticizing Facebook. Open-sourcing code is hard -- see Borg.)

Nothing to run on it??

Correct. "Infrastructure" means a lot of things. You don't get Tupperware, their scheduling and resource management infrastructure, most of their logging infra, most of their monitoring infra, operating systems for the whitebox hardware, even power and facilities management for the OC stuff... I could go on. They are quite good about releasing open source, which is why I was careful to point out that I'm not criticizing Facebook; open sourcing this stuff is really hard, because internal software develops tendrils to other internal things that you often don't want to open source.

The point was that yes, Open Compute exists, but its existence is only partially relevant when one claims that Facebook has opened their "infrastructure." The two sentences in GP are basically what I'm responding to -- mainly the verbatim "FB open sourced their infrastructure" -- and I guess the implied context of Facebook infrastructure was lost when I said "nothing to run on it," sorry. I meant Facebook code. So this is clear: Open Compute is good, and I'm appreciative of Facebook, just want to make sure we understand what "open infrastructure" means and its limitations in this case.

Isn't there any software that would let you run your own social network like facebook on that hardware?

Sure, you could write a social network app (or any other server-side app) and run it on that hardware. It just wouldn't take advantage of any of the Facebook-specific features on that hardware. So you'd be paying for a lot of stuff you're not using. For Facebook, it's more valuable to use it as Facebook hardware than to rent it out as generic servers, because Facebook actually uses all its proprietary features.

>anyone

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