[xrd]

I remember when I was at RealNetworks a long time ago and Microsoft and Real were competing over the future of multimedia languages (SMIL vs HTML+Time). I was on some of the standardization committees and remember being surprised when some of my colleagues suggested that standardization was used by companies like MS to slow down the innovation process (and catch up to faster starts like RealNetworks had made). I wonder how often open source foundations serve the same purpose, or if these are truly embraced by companies like Facebook? Is there a reason internally Facebook would have fought something like this? Is it all roses?

[vjeux]

Lee Byron who was one of the founders of GraphQL and has been actively driving its success in Open Source left Facebook recently (after a very long tenure). Making GraphQL part of a foundation is likely a way for him to be able to keep stewarding the project. He wrote a post with a bit more context: https://medium.com/@leeb/introducing-the-graphql-foundation-...

[jahewson]

It’s common knowledge in the community that GraphQL already covers Facebook’s use cases and they’re wanting others to take up the reigns for new features, e.g. Apollo. A foundation puts all contributors on an even footing.

[joshred]

There's a little of column A, a little of column B.

Standards allow the information economy to function... but influential companies want their internal practices to become 'the standard'.

[k__]

It probably isn't all roses, but I have the feeling people today are more prone to "fork" if they feel belittled, because of the omnipresence of the Internet they feel less weak against big companies.

[syn0byte]

Generalization of Hanlen's razor: Never attribute to malice what can be explained by laziness/greed/stupidity.

FB has GraphQL stable and doing exactly what they want it to do. Now they can pass it off to a foundation for maintenance and blame without having to pay out of pocket.

[krschultz]

GraphQL isn't a system per-say, it's a spec and many tools around it. Putting the spec in a foundation (with a few of those tools) gives the entire community certainty about the direction of the project. Hopefully that spurs more people outside of FB to commit to GraphQL.

The existence of the foundation is orthogonal to FB's internal investment and usage of GraphQL, which was and will continue to be significant.

[chrisweekly]

>"per-say" -> "per se"

Right pronunciation, but it's Latin. :)

[krschultz]

Thanks! At least I learned something today.

[tannhaeuser]

per se = "in and by itself"

Having given tutoring in Latin when I was 15, I'm always dying a little inside if I'm reading "per say".

[superflyguy]

"Generalization of Hanlen's razor: Never attribute to malice what can be explained by laziness/greed/stupidity."

I think OP was going for greed.

[karmakaze]

That seems an over-generalization--greed should counts as malice in spirit. [nit: Hanlon's Razor]