Facebook Open Source Review For Year 2016: Christine Abernathy

As we about bid farewell to year 2016 and start a fresh year 2017 ahead, Facebook has published its Facebook Open Source 2016 year in review.

In 2016, Facebook has launched 77 new projects, and contributors have made over 60,000 commits. With nearly 400 projects and more than 500,000 followers across its entire portfolio, Facebook is committed to maintaining the stability and quality of our projects, and to supporting the communities that have grown around them.

Its top projects, measured by number of total commits made this year, were all open-sourced in previous years and continue to see growth and momentum through adoption and contributions from the community.

They are humbled to have two of flagship projects, React and React Native, surpass 50,000 and 40,000 followers this year, respectively.

It also had some notable newcomers. Draft.js, a React-based rich text editor framework, had a very popular reception within hours of being announced at the React.js Conf earlier this year.

Another React-based project, create-react-app, which bundles everything you need to start building a new app into a single command-line tool, gained immediate traction and is now our fifth most popular project of all time.

Create-react-app was also the first project to be launched within the Facebook Incubator, the new launching point that allows us to evaluate how a project is received by the community and determine how best to manage it over the long term.

It also released a suite of new tools for Android and iOS at F8 this year, and even opened up its F8 app to show people how they can build cross-platform apps easily with React Native and the stack of technologies that work with it. At their annual @Scale conference, they open-sourced Zstandard, a new data compression algorithm that has improved storage requirements at Facebook and beyond.

Finally, they were excited to celebrate the biggest launch — and one of the biggest in GitHub history — with Yarn, a new JavaScript package manager built in collaboration with Exponent, Google, and Tilde. Yarn hit 10,000 followers in its first 48 hours, and today it has more than 1,100 commits and adopted by Travis CI and AppVeyor.

Its collaborations go beyond new launches. Many of the teams at Facebook work openly with others in the industry to help everyone use the projects and tools. Last April, React Native celebrated its first open source anniversary with contributions from both Microsoft and Samsung, bringing React Native support to every major mobile platform. It also worked with Spotify to improve the integration of Infer, static analyzer tool, with its build system. This two-way collaboration not only helped make Infer better but also enabled many other companies, including Uber, to run Infer on their apps as well. Finally, GitHub announced that it would be making its developer API available through GraphQL.

In addition, Facebook has continued its commitment to contribute back to projects and companies whose software are used at Facebook. It have contributed a host of pull requests to core Chef, sat on the Chef Board of Governance, open-sourced 22 new Chef cookbooks, and contributed cgroup2 support to systemd. Twenty-one engineers in our kernel team made more than 600 contributions to mainline Linux, including cgroups2, MD/RAID5 caching, eBPF, btrfs, and buffered writeback fixes.

Facebook AI Research has made many of its resources available to the broader community, including fastText — a library for text representation and classification — which became one of our top new releases this year with more than 5,000 followers. It even open-sourced a camera system: Surround360, our 3D-360 camera, along with its state-of-the-art stitching software.