Having increased its commitment to open source in recent months, Facebook announced on Friday that a piece of internally created software, "Scribe", will be released back to the open source community.
According to a Facebook blog, Scribe has been instrumental in helping the social-networking site handle the enormous amounts of data that come through its servers. As the page for Scribe states: "If you use the site, you've used Scribe."
More specifically, Scribe is a "server for aggregating log data streamed in real-time from a large number of servers...designed to be scalable, extensible without client-side modification, and robust to failure of the network or any specific machine". The average Facebook user will not have much use for the newly open-sourced product.
The release of Scribe can also be considered a message to some of the critics who have been skeptical of Facebook's ability to keep its infrastructure operating at a reasonable cost now that it has more than 100 million active users sending messages and uploading photos around the clock.
By releasing Scribe as open source, Facebook is effectively saying that it can not only devise something to run the site efficiently, but will let people see it too.
This article was first published as a blog on CNET News.com.
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