← All IntelClip / OtherFacebook's Open Compute Project precedent
From Open Source Is Dead. Long Live Open Source. — Saoud Rizwan, Cline · ≈10:58
“So Mark said, "All right, let's just open source it and see what happens."”
“So before open compute, every company designed its own proprietary servers.”
“And so what Facebook found was by giving these designs away they created the market that drove their own costs down and saved them billions of dollars down the road.”
What’s in it
- Explains why Facebook open-sourced its data center designs in 2011
- Draws a parallel between open compute history and today's AI open-source moves
- Shows how giving away tech can commoditize costs industry-wide
Clip transcript
We're seeing the same thing that happened with open compute 15 years ago. So uh just a quick history lesson for those that haven't heard of this. In 2011, Facebook was just getting started on building out um stuff like distributed computing infrastructure and data centers. Uh but by the time they built it, Amazon and Google already beat them to the punch. So it wasn't a competitive advantage. So Mark said, "All right, let's just open source it and see what happens." Uh so they took the designs for their data centers and their servers and their networking and cooling racks and all the physical hardware they spent all this energy and and money um building and they just gave it away. They published uh schematics and CAD files and everything uh and called it the open compute project. And what they saw was that the entire supply chain reorganized around it. So before open compute, every company designed its own proprietary servers. So manufacturers were doing small production runs um of like very custom hardware which was expensive. But when Facebook's designs became this sort of shared open standard, suddenly everyone was ordering the same thing and manufacturers could do these massive standardized production runs commoditizing these components. Um so no single vendor could charge a premium and the price of everything came down uh for the whole industry including Facebook itself. Um and so what Facebook found was by giving these designs away they created the market that drove their own costs down and saved them billions of dollars down the road.
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