Internet giants have joined forces to improve open-source software

Facebook announced at its @Scale 2014 conference in San Francisco Monday that it teamed up with companies including Box, Dropbox, Google, GitHub, Khan Academy, Square, Stripe, Twitter and @WalmartLabs on open-source collaboration TODO, which stands for, “Talk Openly, Develop Openly.” Facebook head of open-source projects James Pearce provided more details about TODO in a post on the social network’s engineering blog.

Facebook has partnered with several large companies to kick off a new project called TODO that aims to improve the way open source software is developed and consumed. Facebook, Google and many other big businesses have come to rely on open source projects, such as the MySQL database, to run their businesses, and particularly their online operations. But they apparently feel there’s room to improve how open source projects are managed and organized, and even room to improve the software itself. The TODO project — which stands for Talk Openly, Develop Openly — addresses those goals. “We want to figure out how we can raise the bar on the quality of open-source software projects in the world,” Jay Parikh, the head of Facebook’s infrastructure group, said at a conference in San Francisco Monday. The TODO project aims to make it easier for a company or organization to get started with using an open source package, and also make it easier to kick off new open source development projects.