How Precision Time Protocol is being deployed at Meta

> Why do so many tech companies seem to be releasing “secret sauce” for free lately?

Is it really their "special sauce" though? Do these types of releases actually give away how these companies make money?

In this particular case, telling the world how to get to nanosecond levels of timekeeping doesn't really help any competitors take away Metabook's revenues or profits.

OTOH if there turns out to be some other way of making money on nanosecond timekeeping, then keeping it secret will help them get into that market before competitors can.

This is just spending "potential money" for engineering talent advertisements.

How FB and Google make money isn't secret either. They have a lot of people looking at their web pages and apps, they record a lot of prior interactions with the ads these people see, they train giant models in near-realtime to predict ad quality, serve the ads that maximize expected profits in an ad auction, and record the subsequent clicks, views, and attributed conversions to convince advertisers to keep spending.

Unless they’re playing 4-D chess and the goal is to make competitors lose time implementing CAP theorem databases, nanosecond precision and React, while they’re pulling ahead.