The fact that so much of the web is closed source now is a great tragedy, and is the result of the fact that those companies primarily see themselves not as software vendors, but as service vendors. They see humans as a kind of zoo animal who isn't really capable of engaging deeply with their software products, and can only jab at buttons.
If Google and Facebook weren't run by supremacists, and instead considered the general public as intelligent beings who are capable of understanding software, we might see more software coming out of those walled gardens. But they don't. Facebook and Google "engineers" (and software "engineers" at large) think of software as fundamentally hard, fundamentally technical, fundamentally something for the precious few with brains big enough to engage with it deeply.
It's just like books used to be, when the educated considered reading too advanced for the unwashed masses.
And so these service companies toss apps over the wall for the plebs to play with, and they keep all the cool toys for themselves.
There are some exceptions. They open source some commodity tools, but only where there is open source competition forcing them to do so.
I find it quite sad. But they'll lose when the web comes roaring back, when some IDE learns to operate within the language of the plebs, and the plebs learn to code, the wizards at Facebook and Google will find out what happens when you treat your customers like they are too stupid to operate at your level. Silicon Valley runs on supremacism. Supremacism breeds resentment. Bumpy roads ahead.
Some people at Google seem to understand this. I see them fighting for an alternate worldview. Maybe when the change happens, that minority will gain control of the company.
I mean, considering I program in React every day, I find this characterization of Facebook's engineers maybe a little insulting. They seem to be perfectly aware their tools are usable by others, and probably went out of their way to make them as usable as possible by others.
Anyways, whatever, my two cents are a lot less passionate than yours, so carry on.
They are using React as a replacement for something like Jquery or Angular. If they kept it in house, they would slowly drift away from the rest of the development community. They only open sourced React in order to benefit from the work of other developers and prevent someone else from copying it and having those resources go into an incompatible de-facto fork.
They certainly didn't do it because they see a path from "Typical Facebook User" to "React User". They see typical Facebook users as consumers of services, incapable of understanding software in a deep way.
And they see them that way because they are supremacists. I don't think this assertion is overblown at all. I wish more programmers would just admit that they are supremacists, then we could get on with talking about whether that's a problem or not.
>They are using React as a replacement for something like Jquery or Angular
How about the fact that it is just flat-out superior? Do you really disregard the tool entirely simply because there are alternatives? React is amazing. I am guessing you don't think much of front-end development?
>They see typical Facebook users as consumers
Who is "they"? Every single person at Facebook? I think you are painting with a broad brush. People work at businesses; they don't follow the party line of said business.
>I wish more programmers would just admit they are supremacists
What is your point? That people who have written enough code that they are capable of developing software think they are more knowledgeable about software than people who haven't written enough code to be capable of developing software?
What about this makes a software engineer a supremacist vs. a mechanic, a scientist, a mechanical engineer, a ....
You've got the timeline precisely backwards here. The move towards making computing less and less like a motorcycle and more and more like a train was _not_ pioneered by companies like Google: they were the ones fighting it kicking and screaming for years. The market demanded that things get less and less hackable and more and more shiny, or at the very least rewarded those (like Apple) that felt that way too.
You guys don't need to come to the defense of Facebook and Google. This shouldn't be about blame. The point is that there's a problem. We need to fix it. Let's stop pointing fingers at each other and point them at ourselves.
I think that inaccuracy in and of itself is a problem when it comes to anything worth discussing. Not all of us see the world through such us-vs-them culture-warrior blinders all the time.
The point I was making that the market is demanding it (as opposed to companies pushing it on users) is entirely material to the discussion.
I think the desire for a closed web is driven much more by the need for a days wages than some overblown sense of superiority to others.
If you disagree, why not spend a day talking to one of those engineers? I'm one. My friends are others. We're mostly nice people, with hardly a sense of superiority at all!
If Google and Facebook weren't run by supremacists, and instead considered the general public as intelligent beings who are capable of understanding software, we might see more software coming out of those walled gardens. But they don't. Facebook and Google "engineers" (and software "engineers" at large) think of software as fundamentally hard, fundamentally technical, fundamentally something for the precious few with brains big enough to engage with it deeply.
It's just like books used to be, when the educated considered reading too advanced for the unwashed masses.
And so these service companies toss apps over the wall for the plebs to play with, and they keep all the cool toys for themselves.
There are some exceptions. They open source some commodity tools, but only where there is open source competition forcing them to do so.
I find it quite sad. But they'll lose when the web comes roaring back, when some IDE learns to operate within the language of the plebs, and the plebs learn to code, the wizards at Facebook and Google will find out what happens when you treat your customers like they are too stupid to operate at your level. Silicon Valley runs on supremacism. Supremacism breeds resentment. Bumpy roads ahead.
Some people at Google seem to understand this. I see them fighting for an alternate worldview. Maybe when the change happens, that minority will gain control of the company.