The social media giant Facebook has decided to give a structure to the open-source software with its new Incubator hub. This prompts developers to think of new ways about the software. With Incubator, projects will be carefully scrutinized and managed.
With proper management, documentation, community engagement and widespread adoption, Facebook wants to help Incubator projects to become their own standalone projects with their own repositories.
At the beginning, Facebook has launched the Create React App to help Reach developers to start on new projects. Using this, developers won't anymore have to worry about configuring files. The environment is already set for them and for production, automatically. The Create React App is also the first project to make it into the Incubator which is on GitHub.
With Incubator, Facebook wants to release open-source projects, ensuring that they can do well in the long run. It's similar to a beta stage or a testing ground to new open-source projects.
But the main difference between this and other open-source projects is that, Incubator is not for everyone: It's only limited to Facebook's own projects. What it does is creating a new way to think about open-source. The idea here is to manage the life cycle of projects better.
"We want to make sure we are managing this program at scale in the most effective way we can," said James Pearce from Facebook in a release, referring to Facebook Incubator. He added that 400 projects have been open-sourced by Facebook, and there are already thousands of its followers on GitHub.
With the popularity of using open-source projects by developers, Facebook has also decided to push most of the new projects through Incubator to check the reaction of the developers' community, in order to judge what the adoption will be like.
Projects for the Incubator itself, being part of Facebook, have teams that work actively on them. To make them pass the standalone repositories, they need to gain traction in the community.
And because the projects are being backed up by Facebook, the company wants to make certain that projects would have good documentation, whether it's difficult to integrate with other tools and projects, and to what extent Facebook can be engaged by the community.
Pearce added that documentation for projects is an important aspect of open-source. For this reason, Facebook has dedicated a team to work on this as well.
While Incubator is part of Facebook, and created just for projects from Facebook, it doesn't mean that developers can't take advantage of the projects within. Projects inside Incubator are open-source in nature.
For this reason some may find Incubator as an unnecessary program. But it's certainly a cleaner way for a large company such as Facebook to distribute new tools without getting lost within the many projects at GitHub.
The Create React App that is first project for Incubator, is already having more than 6,000 stars and 300 forks. This has made Incubator a good start for both Facebook and developers.