Facebook Inc. said today it has signed up as a Platinum Member of The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit technology consortium that supports hundreds of open-source software projects.

The social media giant is one of the best-known contributors to the world of open-source software, so its membership could be considered long overdue. The company contributes to well-known projects such as the React JavaScript library, the Open Compute Project and the cGroup2 container software project, and it also leads the development of open-source projects such as GraphQL, Osquery, ONNX and Presto.

With Facebook signing up as a Platinum member, its head of open source Kathy Kam gets a seat on the Linux Foundation’s board. Kam is a 20-year engineering, product management and developer relations leader with vast experience in open-source software, who previously worked for Google LLC and Microsoft Corp.

In a blog post, the Linux Foundation listed a variety of initiatives Facebook has worked on that “leverage open source to unlock the potential of open innovation.” They include Facebook’s Connectivity initiative, which works with the open-source Telecom Infra Project Foundation to bring fast and reliable internet services to remote areas of the world by making it easier for telecommunications providers to deploy mobile networks in hard-to-reach areas.

Other initiatives include Facebook’s Data for Good program that shares geographic data with the aim of addressing humanitarian issues such as COVID-19, and the Deepfake Detection Challenge, which is a competition that encourages developers to create new ways to detect deepfake videos.

Facebook is also the creator of the PyTorch machine learning library that’s used for applications such as computer vision and natural language processing.

“The Linux Foundation has and continues to play a crucial role in the continued success of not only Linux but also in broader open-source ecosystems as well,” Kam said in a statement. “We hope that this sponsorship will further the goal of keeping Linux and all of open source thriving for years to come.”

Image: Thought catalog