The Lightning brand has been part of the Salesforce ecosystem since October 2014, when the San Francisco-based company announced the Salesforce1 Lightning Framework, a toolkit for developers to ...

Salesforce.com had already been using Lightning to run the Salesforce1 mobile app announced last year. “Now we’re exposing it to customers and partners,” he said.

For Salesforce, the upside to open sourcing Lightning Web Components is that it could gain more developers. Salesforce may also be able to leverage the open source community for new features and apps.

Sales Cloud Lightning integrates SteelBrick CPQ, technology from an ISV partner that the company recently acquired, with a popular quote-to-cash solution built on the Salesforce platform.