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Comment by heran | Hacker News Reader

yeah as far as I know, at least 5 sites are testing it cuz I see many support tickets coming in. Give it a few more days and there should be live sites using it. The project was launched 10 days ago btw, so it's still figuring out the best approach. (I've been contributing docs to the project)

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Seems like only one company's employees are working on this, is this really open source?

From the commit log - at least 2 other companies have contributed: https://github.com/prebid/Prebid.js/commits/master

And yes, the project is open source under the Apache license, so are the docs. All open source projects start somewhere :)

Besides, open source is the way to go and it doesn't make sense for any company to own it for the below reasons:

1. No bidder wants their code hosted by some 3rd party hidden away from them.

2. No bidder wants their code hosted by especially another bidder. This introduces huge conflict of interests and defeats the purpose of header bidding.

3. All websites can benefit from this open source project and make each others' implementation better.

4. So far websites are SCREWED by some bidders that make blocking calls. Prebid.js ensures all calls are async. See the analysis here: http://prebid.org/blog/how-many-bidders-for-header-bidding/#...

The beauty of the project is to host a true, fair, open auction in the browser. Open source is the way to go.

I'm a supporter of open source. I think this project has a lot of potential benefits for publishers and ad tech in general. Interesting to see how DSPs react.

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