The Meta CEO’s embrace of open source is nothing more than an opportunistic move

There’s no question Facebook is a platform. It’s arguably been the most important websites of the social media era, playing host to a series of apps, pages, groups, marketplace services, and much more, all of which were designed to keep people online as long as possible. But for most people, the Facebook platform can only be reached through another set of platforms: the mobile operating systems and app stores controlled by Google and especially Apple.

Facebook was late to the mobile revolution. It only really doubled down on mobile and made an explicit effort to improve its app-based experience in 2012. Mobile fueled Facebook’s growth through the 2010s, but it also increased its dependence on Google and Apple — and a decade later it would be burned.

In 2020, Apple announced plans to introduce a feature called App Tracking Transparency that would make tracking much more visible to users and ultimately had to effect of significantly reducing the number of iPhone and iPad users who allowed apps to track them as extensively as they used to when the feature rolled out the following year. That one change had huge implications for Facebook and the other social media apps under the Meta umbrella — and the company had little recourse against what Apple correctly positioned as a pro-consumer feature. In 2022, that one change wiped out an estimated $12.8 billion in Facebook revenue and hit Meta’s share price even harder.

Mark Zuckerberg was furious and unsurprisingly started lashing out at Apple’s “closed” ecosystem, picking up on an existing fight other companies had already started to wage against the control Apple wielded over its app store. Zuckerberg criticized the self-serving limitations Apple placed on its platforms, as though his company hadn’t done the very same, and claimed Meta was embracing an “open” ecosystem. But from the beginning, that commitment to openness was only ever about carving out a position of dominance in whatever the next platform might be.

Pitching an “open” metaverse

When Zuckerberg unveiled his vision for the metaverse in 2021, he quite explicitly called out Apple. “Living under their rules has profoundly shaped my views on the tech industry,” he said, suggesting he was turning a new leaf by embracing openness. He specifically called attention to Apple’s “high fees” and the “lack of choice” on its platform as a means of stifling innovation. Meta was going to be different, or so Zuckerberg claimed, as the mobile revolution came to a close.

In the vision he pitched, Meta would spend tens of billions of dollars to build out whatever the metaverse was going to become and emphasized it would be open to creators and other companies. In short, he wanted to form the foundation — or the platform — on which everyone else would build businesses of their own. At the time, Epic’s Tim Sweeney was saying similar things, but it was clear that in both cases the CEOs were not waging a war on Apple on the part of consumers or creators — as they were claiming — but to serve their own business interests.

Sweeney admitted he wanted Epic to be the “leading service provider in every area [of the metaverse], including the engine space, server hosting, asset marketplace, and first-party experiences.” He wanted to dislodge Apple so Epic could step in to fill that space. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg wanted something similar: not just to control the infrastructure, software platform, and digital marketplaces through which people would transact, but even the hardware people would use to access the virtual world — through its Oculus and Meta Quest headsets. Despite his criticism of Apple’s high fees, Meta later announced it planned to take a 47.5% cut of virtual asset sales through its platform, far more than even Apple’s 30% fee.

Zuckerberg saw how the public mood was changing and sought to take advantage of it for his commercial interests. For a brief time, it looked like the metaverse might become a mass-market product that would create a whole new digital economy where Meta would be able to reap monopoly profits. Zuckerberg even renamed the company after the pursuit, in part because he wanted the vision to be realized, but also to distract from growing scandals engulfing the company’s social media websites. But when it became clear the metaverse was a dud and artificial intelligence (AI) would be the next big tech fad, he wasted no time in pivoting, while bringing that language of openness with him.

Meta’s open source AI push

As Meta made its move into the world of generative AI with its Llama models, it once again chose to use the language of openness. It was a particularly effective strategy because

OpenAI, the company driving the hype cycle, had previously claimed to be a champion of openness, only to abandon it along with many of its other supposed principles as the commercial benefits became too hard to ignore. Instead, Zuckerberg was able to position himself as the open source champion of the generative AI moment.

But once again, the embrace of open source wasn’t a selfless act. Meta’s Llama models still have strict licensing agreements that have caused some experts to question how much they even count as open source. The company also makes money off Llama integrations with major cloud providers and commercial licensing arrangements. The tech industry has a long history of taking advantage of open source efforts and refocusing them toward their ends. Zuckerberg’s strategy is no different.

As Cecilia Rikap argues in a new report for Common Wealth, open sourcing “increases success rates and minimizes Big Tech innovation risk while they keep turning vital knowledge modules into their intangible assets. Partly unwittingly, even the open source community that was fostered to counterbalance large tech companies’ power has been co-opted.” In the case of Meta, Rikap explains that the company reaps plenty of rewards from its open source strategy: it keeps tech workers happy, gets the open source community to provide early feedback on Llama models for free, and increases its speed of adoption.

Since Meta doesn’t have a public cloud business like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, it relies on those companies to run its models. OpenAI, for example, is deeply dependent on Microsoft because it needs access to its cloud infrastructure. “Although the models are in open source, accessing them has an indirect fee in terms of renting compute processing power,” wrote Rikap. “And there is a hidden clause that states that companies with more than 700 million active users must get a separate license from Meta.” Zuckerberg may have embraced the open source narrative, but only to ensure Meta’s Llama models become a dominant platform for AI development that will reap other rewards for the company.

Zuckerberg wants total control

When Zuckerberg set out to build the metaverse, achieving the virtual world of Snow Crash or Ready Player One was just one of his goals, and ultimately it came second the broader ambition of escaping the shackles of his company’s dependence on Apple. He saw how Apple was already being framed as a closed and a restrictive force in the tech industry, so he adopted those narratives for Meta as he tried to reframe his company as a champion of openness that was on the side of consumers.

In the years that followed, it’s become even more obvious how empty those claims always were. The metaverse was a means to an end, and when it become clear it wasn’t going to be the platform of the future, Meta’s Reality Labs division was hit with major cuts as the company pivoted to AI to try to carve out a dominant position there instead.

Zuckerberg isn’t an open source champion or a reformed tech billionaire; he’s an opportunist who will say and do whatever is necessary to win. He used the same narrative with his Twitter competitor Threads and when the AI bubble crashes, expect to see him bring the same playbook to whatever comes next. But don’t believe it’s about anything other than increasing his power over the technology we all depend on.