
Twitter is built on open source software - Ashuu
http://twitter.github.io/
======
capkutay
Twitter is also a leading silicon valley tech company with hundreds of
extremely intelligent employees. You could easily argue that they may have one
of the best engineering staffs in the world. Given that, of course they would
use open source versus buying enterprise products.

In terms of engineering staff, they are the exception, not the norm. A company
like home depot or kelly moore paints would have a tough time relying on open
source for all their operational software.

~~~
josephagoss
I might put SpaceX, Google and even companies like Boeing very far ahead of
Twitter when it comes to "one of the best engineering staffs in the world"

EDIT: I added Google because of robots, AI and driverless cars, I'm not really
sure Twitter is on that level.

~~~
threeseed
What you're doing is stupid. All you're doing is placing software engineering
behind all of the classes of engineering. Why not mention companies like BP,
Pfizer or Toyota ?

In terms of software engineering Twitter is absolutely one of the best around.

~~~
username223
Calling what Twitter does -- SMS with ads and RoundRects -- leading software
engineering is an insult to software engineers. If twitter built cars and
planes, I would walk.

~~~
xentronium
It's no insult. Given enough scale, simplest things like posting 140 character
messages become engineering challenges.

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namespace
Shouldn't it be "Twitter is building open source software"? Pointing out the
obvious since most of the software companies are built on open source software
but only a few build one.

~~~
moreentropy
True dat.

I think close to 100% of the internet is built on/with open source software.

But it's a major headache to get your in house libraries/software released as
open source. There's reservations because by default everything developed is
considered proprietary and a trade secret. It's difficult to convince
management to give stuff back and/or see a benefit, the larger the org the
harder it gets. Then comes legal with the legal derp.

And finally you can't just put stuff on Github and expect it to thrive, you
need resources to maintain your open source projects and again convince
management beforehand that it's not just a liability.

~~~
blumkvist
Can you list a few benefits of releasing custom coded solutions to the public?

The only one I can see is building culture/name for yourself (which I don't
consider a trivial thing), but I can't think of anything else.

~~~
IgorPartola
Sure. Your grateful users might add a feature you didn't have time for. Or
they might find a security issue and send you a patch as a part of responsible
disclosure. Or they might start hacking on your codebase and actually do
something cool. Then you can hire them/buy them out, turning your codebase
into a nice recruiting tool.

Think about this: if Twitter open sources 100% of their code, what would
change? Would Twitter clones pop up all over the place? No, because Twitter is
the software + infrastructure + name. Most companies think that their code
contains some type of secret sauce that makes it special. In reality that's
not true. Sure, Google may hide their exact PageRank algorithm, but they don't
need to hide their web server code. Or their indexing algorithm. Companies
like Twitter are even better for this: they do absolutely nothing that's
really proprietary.

For an example of this on a much smaller scale look at TheTVDB
([http://thetvdb.com/](http://thetvdb.com/)), their entire site source is OSS,
yet there are no clones.

~~~
d23
For some companies where the barrier to entry is very high or requires a lot
of market share to compete, this may be true. But for others where the
investment in actually building the thing was the only barrier, giving the
code out to the world can be a terrifying prospect.

~~~
IgorPartola
You are right, it's not always appropriate. However, in most cases, it's just
fine. Here's a list of companies that I think could open up at least 95% of
their code: Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Tesla/Ford/GMC/Toyota/BMW/any car
manufacturer, Apple, Home Depot/Walmart/Safeway/any retailer, Mint, Twitter,
Facebook, Google, and many more.

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mjackson
I actually built this page a few years ago when I was working at Twitter
during a hack day (bonus points if you can find the easter egg!). It's fun to
see it on HN again.

Anyone who is interested in Twitter's current open source contributions should
definitely check out the open source section of their engineering site as
well:

[https://engineering.twitter.com/opensource](https://engineering.twitter.com/opensource)

~~~
darklrd
Amazing work! :)

~~~
mjackson
Thanks! :D

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alexatkeplar
There's some undue harshness in this thread. Twitter have been _huge_ open
source contributors to the Scala and big data communities with original works
like Scalding, Summingbird, Scala School, twitter/util and tons of other code.
The work they have shared has been a big part of us at Snowplow being able to
build a scalable open source analytics platform.

Keep up the great work guys.

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polemic
It's worth considering the value of IP to a business like twitter.
Fundamentally the mechanics of twitter are exceedingly simple - especially
when you consider the complexity of apps like Facebook and Google+.

They key difference between Twitter and a would-be competitor is scale (and
that's why the _actual_ mechanics are not simple at all), but you don't get to
that scale on the strength of technology alone. More importantly, once you're
at that scale you become exceedingly hard to dethrone, for primarily non-
technical reasons.

That is why Twitter can afford to be extremely generous when it comes to
releasing IP. Of course they don't have either, so thanks Twitter!

------
jroseattle
While Facebook and Google are constantly one-upping each other with their open
data center designs and open server architectures, Twitter contributes project
after project that are applicable to a far larger group of people. Very much
appreciated.

~~~
jbroman
I don't mean to put down Twitter's contribution to open source – which is
substantial – but I think you're underestimating Google and Facebook's
contributions when you suggest that they are only "one-upping each other with
... open data center designs".

I'm more familiar with Google's contributions, but I would imagine both high-
user-visibility projects like Android and Chromium and more developer-oriented
projects like protobuf, the Closure Compiler, the Dart and Go programming
languages, googletest, Guava, Guice, WebM/WebP, V8, Breakpad qualify. I could
consider all of these "projects that are applicable to a large group of
people". This, on top of large contributions to other key projects like the
Linux kernel and LLVM.

I know less about Facebook's contributions, but I do know that their open
source projects includes HipHop/HHVM, and they contribute significantly to
Hadoop, LLVM and Mercurial (among other high-profile projects).

~~~
nostrademons
Gumbo as well:

[https://github.com/google/gumbo-parser](https://github.com/google/gumbo-
parser)

(And LevelDB, Snappy, Angular, GoogleTest, tcmalloc and google-perftools,
lmctfy, etc.)

------
mkolodny
Interesting to see that Twitter Bootstrap isn't on that list.

~~~
quarterto
That's because it's no longer _Twitter_ Bootstrap. @mdo works at Github, @fat
at Medium.

------
wanda
[https://about.twitter.com/press/brand-
assets](https://about.twitter.com/press/brand-assets)

The first rule of the Twitter bird is: You do not change the form of the
Twitter bird.

The second rule of the Twitter bird is: You DO NOT change the form of the
Twitter bird.

The third rule: If someone Tweets without referring back to Twitter, the game
is over.

The fourth rule: No speech bubbles, no inadequate portions of space around the
bird

The fifth rule: If this is your first experience with the Twitter bird, you
have to Tweet with Twitter.

------
streptomycin
A walled garden built on open source software. Thanks Twitter!

~~~
conradev
It's one thing to take advantage of open source software, but it's another to
contribute back to open source. The point of this page is to show the latter…

~~~
RegW
Yes, that may be so, but perhaps (in some cases) it is because they feel
legally obliged to:

"This repository is published in order to share code and information and is
not intended to be used directly outside of Twitter. We provide no guarantees
of bug fixes, ongoing maintenance, compatibility, or suitability for any user
outside of Twitter"

[https://github.com/twitter/mysql](https://github.com/twitter/mysql)

------
damaru
the world is built on open source software...

------
westi
This is cool and they should probably do something so that things like
[https://github.com/twitter/killdeer](https://github.com/twitter/killdeer) are
no longer listed on the page.

It was a strange experience to scroll down, see something that sounded
interesting and then end up at a repo like that.

------
xcrunner529
I don't get why they won't just open source their main app code. It's already
been mentioned, it's not like the concept is difficult or couldn't be
cloned...it's simply not practical for many reasons. But being able to have
the code if really cool from an educational aspect.

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stblack
What is the significance of the color in the top right hand corner of each
repo-box?

~~~
wise_young_man
It shows the language that the majority of the code is written in.

For example, go to [https://github.com/twitter/twitter-text-
js](https://github.com/twitter/twitter-text-js) and click on the red bar.

More info at [https://github.com/blog/1037-highlighting-repository-
languag...](https://github.com/blog/1037-highlighting-repository-languages)

------
codex
Twitter uses open source because they do not have the resources to build and
maintain custom infrastructure, nor do they think infrastructure is what
distinguishes their business. It's that simple.

~~~
abalone
Only half that statement is true. Twitter has tons and tons of custom
infrastructure. Most of those projects are largely built and maintained by
Twitter. But their business is built on network effects not trade secret
infrastructure, so releasing it as open source helps more than it hurts.

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static_typed
We owe Twatter a big thanks for showing Rails on Fails doesn't scale (via so
many fail whales), and so guided many a new startup to explore Scala, Erlang,
Python, C++11 - basically things with a good chance to help not hinder your
startup.

Thanks Twatter!

------
johnreese23
And how much of IPO money is going back to open source ?

