Yes, this is in the best interests of those creating platforms: help other people get their business on your platform. The incentives make sense. More internet means more people on facebook means more ad revenue from Zimbabwe or where ever they haven't penetrated yet. More electric cars means more charging at the Tesla stations. Just think incentives, and a lot of seemingly baffling business moves "they just gave away their secrets!!" start to make a lot of sense.
I wonder if this could be the result of some influence from (or competition with) the Chinese - whose companies have been well known to be "unofficially open" as a way to encourage more business: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297
Having founded several open source companies (ninjablocks.com and geekammo.com), I can tell you it's not a result of some influence from (or competition with) the Chinese. It's just doing the right thing. If you're making hardware platforms that people are going to build upon, it's in everyone's interest to open them up.
For Geekammo we went entirely open, and it was great with great contributions (https://github.com/geekammo/MicroView-Arduino-Library) from the community. With Ninja Blocks we were only open on the hardware and client software (not the server).
Exactly. They may be hardware makers, but they aren't hardware companies. IBM sells services, so it's just an inversion of the usual free customer service when you buy a product. Open sourcing some servers just lowers costs for Facebook and keeps some engineers happy.
That can be paraphrased as "making everybody richer, so they can pay a highter rent".
In the end of the day, it's a very good thing. And someday somebody will comoditize their unique offerings, and everybody will stop paying this one rent too.
