Mark Zuckerberg: “Open Source is good business”

Understanding how Open Source can help tech companies make more money

3 min readFeb 2, 2024

On Meta’s most recent Earnings Call, Mark Zuckerberg went into some detail about how Meta Open Sourcing their work after spending millions would help them commercially. Here is what Zuck had to say-

This is an idea that I’ve talked about many times, but some people were still skeptical. Here is Meta talking about the benefits of Open Sourcing their work. TL;DR: Open Sourcing helps with R&D, and since it will always exist, you might as well become a market leader in it.

Firstly OSS → exposure to more diverse groups. This enables people to experiment with different techniques, account for more kinds of challenges etc., creating a very strong evolutionary pressure. This is why OS models have been so competitive with Big Tech, despite fewer resources. The diversity also enables OSS to avoid many of the biases implicit in the very closed-world of Big Tech:

Here’s an example- research positions in these companies generally require a Masters/Ph.D. degree. If most people in your research teams are from research team are from this background, they will replicate many of the flaws found in academia and upper-level education. And these will be invisible to the people in the system (and very hard to change because of the status quo bias). Once again, the Open Source community has a much lower barrier to entry- allowing more people to contribute. And when we put lots of different people together, and let them cook, great things happen.
-Source

Meta released React to the world a decade back, and it has become an industry standard. As developers utilize React, they dynamically make innovations to match their needs (new libraries, features, etc.). Some of these are then folded back by Meta, helping them tremendously. Same goes for PyTorch, FAISS, and other ideas.

Open Sourcing also helps with hiring. If people already use your frameworks prior to joining your company, the training time required to is reduced drastically. Not to mention, you get access to a great pool of pre-screened potential hires.

All of these reasons make Open Source very commercially appealing. For more insights into how Open Source dictates the business strategies of various companies ( for eg. why Google and Microsoft are trying to go against it) read the following-

Unpacking the Financial Incentives for Open Source vs Closed Source [Markets]

Why Meta is fighting for Open Source LLMs while Microsoft wants to regulate them.

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