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Some Books Are More Open Than Others
Facebook may be getting its first wrinkles. Not laughter lines. As of last month, Facebook is estimated to have around 83 million users worldwide. That's a pretty big family and they need to keep the hordes interested with the help of developers.
Last year Facebook launched Platform which was more of a "flatform" really. What would any social-backboned network do? Add the "open source" string to the yarn a year later. Since June this year, the season of Facebook Open Platform is here.
Legalese
Now, Facebook Open Platform is licensed under the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL), except for the FBML parser, which includes Mozilla source code, which is licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). As OStatic explains, CPAL requires display of an attribution notice on derivative works.
By choosing CPAL, Facebook has ensured that it can be open source without anyone actually using its source. If Facebook wanted to prevent modifications of their platform, why would they open source at all?
Let's say the objective is to protect the Facebook platform from competition (i.e., derivative works), Facebook made a good call. But if they really wanted to encourage development, then was it a scotch call to the wrong license?
“Developers and users are fickle. They are going to go where barriers to entry are the lowest,” said Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Forrester Research. Facebook, he said, “needs to continue to build relationships with these developers or it is just going to be one of many platforms.”
On The Road To Ol' Calcutta
The case of the Agarwalla brothers is an interesting one. They are an Indian-based duo behind Facebook's popular Scrabble knockoff, Scrabulous. "After not finding a decent online environment to enjoy word games, the brothers decided to create their own website so that users from all over the world could enjoy." Nice Altruists from Kolkata.
Hasbro, who keep shekel-watch over board games like Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit, were not happy. According to TIME.com, Hasbro alleged copyright infringement in its suit, pointing out that Scrabulous used the same colors as the classic Scrabble board and mimicked it in many other ways. The Agarwallas contended that many sites have knocked off Scrabble over the years and that the game is virtually in the public domain at this point. A day after Hasbro filed the lawsuit to force the duo to take down Scrabulous, the software developers quietly launched a new version on Facebook. Open Platform = open door.
Tumbleweed
Facebook isn't the one being served papers. The developers are getting singed. Facebook guards attribution of its "property" like a German Shepard, yet disregards the attribution of others. Caution. I do believe the principle of IBM and Microsoft's early collaboration may be interesting. 
Missed Memo
In the meanwhile, with the new Facebook's advertising moved to the screen right, and doubled-up, that click-dependent revenue may just dip a bit more. Even in the top 10 countries, the clickthroughrate is on average, about 45 out of every 100,000 times the ad is shown. Poor Facebook is not looking quite so accountable.