Could Facebook Have Been Open-Sourced

I watched the movie “The Social Network” last night and noticed a comment about Mark Z. deciding to not sell his technology in high school to Microsoft and instead just posting it all online. That was a great moment in the movie as his announcement of this seemed like no big deal to him but the people hearing this were a bit shocked. It’s a shame that this wasn’t played up a few more moments so Mark could have commented on why opening this product up to everyone on the web benefited more people than selling to Microsoft. Unfortunately, the movie moved quickly on andThis did get me thinking, what if Facebook had been open-sourced? Would they have 500+ million users as they have today or would something else have emerged. Does having an open code base prevent a company from being successful? Is the Facebook system the valuable aspect of the company or the user data and connections? I argue that the real power of Facebook is the massive data collection of users and the associated connection amongst the data and not the Facebook system itself. Even if I had the source code of the Facebook system, I could never hope to recreate the success of Facebook due to the lack of data; after all, why join a small social network when you could easily join in with 500+ million other people. Of course you could argue that Facebook needed to be closed while growing its massive user database otherwise other alternatives would have emerged, except that other larger and more successful solutions already existed in the market (e.g. MySpace) so I don’t see this as a possible issue. In fact, having Facebook open sourced would have enabled the system to add new features and better integrate with existing standards and technology from a global community of developers who clearly would have jumped at the chance to take part in the growth of this extraordinary social network platform. After all, why limit the growth of a product to just who you can hire; why not recruit the globe? As you can see, if Facebook had open-sourced they could have grown even faster with better technology and could be even more dominant today and have the underlying technology become Internet standards which would only enable Facebook to work better. Do you agree? What critical element am I missing?

never brought this concept up again. I was waiting for the movie to come full circle again to see when the decision was made to not open source Facebook but instead make it a closed source solution; again, I was left waiting.