I don't think there's been any policy changes. I think the policy has always been that we're open to open sourcing stuff, so long as it is useful to others (ie, not just a code drop that nobody can use) and someone signs up for the work and there isn't something important that's being dropped in the process.

The difference I think is people, energy, and momentum.

We've been able to find people (many already at the company) genuinely interested in some of the less glamorous parts of building a scalable program to open source things - things like sync processes and pull request management and UIs for ACLs and CLAs and so forth.

We've had people who, often due to the availability of these tools, have developed an internal energy to want to put in the extra effort to make their project ready to be open sourced (like making sure all dependencies are available already, or scoping out or stubbing out things that are Facebook-specific (our asset management flow, for example) while still keeping the software useful, and so forth.

The momentum has also made the idea of open sourcing code more top-of-mind to people, which helps to get people to rewrite their changes to accommodate a nascent open sourcing effort on a piece of code, or to get more discretionary time to investigate or work on making something open source. Or even just moral support from your team and colleagues.