10 Things Facebook's Given Away to Take Over the World

Facebook was originally built using PHP—a popular programming language that makes it easy to quickly create websites. But while PHP is a great tool for rapid development, it’s not ideal for running an enormous website like Facebook. So Facebook engineered a way to supercharge PHP. Its engineers built a tool called Hip Hop Virtual Machine. It translated PHP into machine code—the native language spoken by computer chips that make up the company’s servers—on the fly. Then Facebook open sourced the work. HHVM is so impressive that other large tech operations, including Box and Wikipedia, now use it.

Wait, you can open source an entire data center? You sure can, as Facebook has proven. Through the Open Compute project, Facebook has given away its special data center designs, which use outside air to cool server farms. This saves not only money, but energy, since those energy-heavy chillers typically needed to keep servers cool are no longer essential. “We’ve had some people say: ‘Can we build this data center?’” Ken Patchett, the manager of a Facebook data center in Prineville, Oregon, told WIRED in 2011. “And we say: ‘Of course, you can. Do you want the blueprints?'”

Facebook started a trend when it open sourced its inventive modular server design. “By modularizing the design, you can rip and place the bits that need to be upgraded, but you can leave the stuff that’s still good,” Frank Frankovsky, Facebook’s hardware guru, said in 2013. Because of that, servers can keep memory and flash storage pieces that don’t have to be replaced as often as, say, the processor. Facebook's idea was so good that the world’s largest server chip designers—including Intel and AMD—got involved, making plans for modular servers using low-power ARM processors similar to ones found in Apple smartphones.

Cisco has good reason to be nervous. That’s because as of last year, Facebook said it was running on computer networking gear designed by its in-house engineers. The gear, codenamed “Wedge” and “Six-Pack,” have simpler designs than popular hardware purveyors Cisco and Juniper, and also more efficiently build, expand, and operate the enormous computer networks needed to run Facebook’s web services. Not only does the company use this gear itself, it's made the blueprints open source so others can use it, too. One upshot of the move: the creation of a market for cheaper and simpler hardware, much of it manufactured in Asia. And the power of such markets to push new technologies forward is exactly what Facebook wants.

In a bid to lure top talent to artificial intelligence research, Facebook (and Google) have made the designs for their AI systems public. Facebook's system, code-named Big Sur, is a machine packed with an enormous number of graphics processing units, or GPUs—chips particularly well suited to deep learning. Deep learning is already hard at work on tasks ranging from automatically recognizing faces and objects on social networks to translating online phone calls from one language to another on the fly. But now that its major AI project is open source, Facebook seems to be hoping that breakthroughs accelerating the field could happen even faster.

At this year's F8, Facebook unveiled a wireless antenna system called Terragraph, designed to improve on Wi-Fi and cellular phone signals by distributing a high-bandwidth signal inside a city. The company also said it would give away its designs through the Telecom Infrastructure Project, which it recently created to house open source plans for telecom hardware. The open source designs aren’t ready just yet, but Facebook is already testing the tech. This may sound like unbounded charity, but it actually makes sense for Facebook. If Facebook can expand the internet and its reach, well, that expands the reach of Facebook, too.

Two-thirds of the world’s population is not yet online, and Facebook wants to connect them—using lasers and drones. And it may do it for free. At Facebook, a division called the Connectivity Lab is hard at work building infrared lasers, Earth-orbiting satellites, and a fleet of flying drones powered by the light of the sun. The goal: To reach the people who live in parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America that don't have good internet infrastructure. Facebook's vice president of engineering Jay Parikh has hinted that these projects could follow Facebook's philosophy of giving stuff away to help connect the world—which also helps Facebook itself.

Companies like Ricoh, Nokia, and even Google all have their own complex 360-degree video devices. But Facebook’s new creation, the Surround 360, goes a step further by making the whole thing open source. This summer, the company will share both hardware and software schematics with the public, and it hopes people will both modify and manufacture the device. The 360-degree spherical video it produces can be used in both smartphones and virtual reality headsets like the Samsung Gear, offering a bridge to the full-fledged VR Facebook will eventually offer through its more advanced Oculus Rift headset. Then Facebook wouldn't just be the king of the two dimensions—it'll reach into and capture even the third.