Netflix is going to the movies with its Open Source Center on Github. In a clever play, Netflix has taken its well-known brand and placed it on GitHub to show each of its open source projects as its own movie, genre and characters.
Rolling over each movie poster thumbnail reveals a description of the open-source tool, the number of viewers, the number of forks, and the last update. The image links back to GitHub where developers can get the code and collaborate on projects.
Netflix has established itself as a company that gives back to the community the tools it has developed to keep its infrastructure running. Harper Reed, CTO for President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, told me yesterday that the campaign would often use Netflix’s wealth of resources and open source tools to deploy and manage apps to Amazon Web Services (AWS). I’ll get to that in a later post.
But of course on Hacker News, Netflix has plenty of skeptics. One person said some of the images are distasteful, another calls it a mystery-meat UI, and another said he will be impressed when Netflix has better cross-platform support.
I have to give credit to Netflix. The world of open source can be pretty inaccessible. Netflix Open Source Center at least gives it a little life — for, no doubt, this is a world full of characters.