Cloud platform players have taken heat for not giving back to the open source community equitably. Salesforce now says it views open source as a wellspring for innovation.

Salesforce recently contributed its Lightning Web Components framework to open source. The Lightning Web Components framework provides developers with a standards-based JavaScript model to build enterprise apps on the Salesforce Lightning low-code development environment.

With this move to push its web components platform out in the open, Salesforce hopes to jumpstart web development on the Salesforce CRM platform. "It positions Salesforce to enrich its Lightning Web Components platform with decentralized contributions and innovation from the open source community," said Arnal Dayaratna, an analyst at IDC.

However, it will take at least a year to build an open source community around the technology because the Lightning Web Components framework is relatively mature, he said. Salesforce launched the framework last December.

Salesforce is not new to open source code contributions. Apache Phoenix, released in 2014, enables OLTP and operational analytics in Hadoop for low latency applications. Salesforce also open sourced its TransmogrifAI project, an automated machine learning library for structured data, in August 2018.

Salesforce Lightning Web Components Playground