Is Facebook a good open source player?

Even Facebook addicts sometimes get scared that the giant they are contributing to could turn nasty. Is it really taking care of your personal data? Now there's another question - how serious are its open source aims?

The privacy question came up in Canada, where Facebook was charged with violating privacy laws.

Meanwhile, the social networking site was accused of being the "Microsoft of Social Networking" when it open sourced part of its platform. fbOpen will potentially let people with Facebook apps run them on other social networking sites, but there's lots of caveats to it.

Facebook Platform - the bit of Facebook that supports third party apps - has been partly open sourced in the fbOpen program, which includes software to download, and APIs.

Potentially, if another social network wants, it can implement a compatible platform, and developers who have made Facebook apps can move them across. That would make this a response to the OpenSocial move by Google, Yahoo and Myspace.

But the devil - as always - will be in the detail. ZDNet blogger Steve O'Hear says fbOpen appears to be much more inward looking, focussing on allowing developers to improve the Facebook Platform itself, not on spreading it to other networks.

And others objected to its choice of the controversial CPAL open source licence, sometimes called a "badgeware" licence, which requires anyone implementing it to include a logo and possibly a splash screen publicising the original creator.

That's unpopular in some quarters, but CPAL backer Ross Mayfield argues that ordinary distribution licences don't handle the situation where code is run from a site not "distributed".

A day on from the announcement, opinion seems to have settled from some of the first criticism. Let's keep an eye on this one.