Phat Site Blog

In what is becoming the rule rather than the exception, Digg is the latest social media player to “come out of the closet” and not only acknowledge that it is built on open source components, but they have contributed to and host several open source projects. Like Facebook and Twitter, Digg loves open source.

Digg has put up its own open source page that lists which open source components Digg uses, libraries it hosts and so on. Here is what they say:

We also give back by mirroring a couple of projects; PEAR and Debian. further, we maintain Debian packages of some of the projects below, indicated by Debian ,

So if you run Debian, be sure to check out our instructions on building your own Debian packages. the projects distributed through the PEAR repository are indicated by PEAR.

Interestingly Digg is another user of Cassandra, the Facebook developed distributed data storage system. Digg has also gone a step further and made many of the Digg packages ready to run on Debian Linux. They are also storing a lot of their open source stuff on their own Github page.

Digg’s love of open source is one more illustration that open source is really powering the social media revolution. Recent analysis is also indicating that open source will be a major factor in the adoption of cloud computing as well.

The move to the cloud and (I hate the term, but what can I do), web 2.0 technologies has really been ushered in by a golden age of open source dominance. What is interesting is that all of these companies are not afraid of losing their competitive edge by sharing their open source components.

Digg Takes Pride in Open Source Usage, Contributions