[erikpukinskis]

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.

[nawgszy]

>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 ....

[ry_ry]

As an aside, jQuery isn't really comparable to React or Angular. They do entirely different things.