OStatic

As we wrote last week (after initial reports came out on TechCrunch), Facebook is open sourcing what it calls a significant part of its Facebook Platform. What does a significant part mean? According to the company it means most of the code that runs Facebook Platform plus implementations of many of the most-used methods and tags. Especially for many developers who want to build social applications, this looks like good news, but OStatic readers wrote in last week questioning whether Facebook is really going open source (see the comments in the link above). Is it?

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced its intention to purchase Yahoo for $44 billion in cash and stock. Now, Yahoo has announced its intention to become a fully open, platformizable company, letting developers mix and match its services and data in new and different ways. How much of this is designed to make Yahoo more profitable, and how much is simply a reaction to Microsoft's acquisition attempt? Will openness bring Yahoo more revenues, or simply make it a cooler company in developers' eyes?