[shafte]

Glad to see the team really embrace the nitty-gritty of keeping the open-source community healthy. React Native is a project with a lot of potential that's taken a few high-profile lumps this past year. Being an OSS maintainer can be difficult and thankless sometimes, but it's good to see teams that recommit to open source instead of withdrawing and focusing solely on internal needs.

[stevepotter]

Can I have more information on the "high profile lumps this past year"? Thanks!

[itwy]

'thankless'! They are getting paid big bucks as Facebook employees. What are you talking about?

[warent]

Well, aside from money though have you seen some of the issues created on git repos and their responses? The software is OSS and free, yet there are countless people who use it acting like they're high profile businesses deserving white-glove treatment and they'll totally take out their anger on a maintainer.

[throwaway_9168]

To counter your point, you might remember the React team's about face when probably their largest benefactor in terms of free goodwill, Wordpress, threatened to drop ReactJS for its ambiguous license. I would think it matters a lot to FB right now that they don't do anything remotely annoying to the community.

I would be willing to bet that if Facebook adopted an attitude of "screw it, lets just stop responding to these idiots" that will make even fewer people want to work at Facebook right now, given all the bad press these days. I bet if you ask people why they are still continuing at Facebook these days, a fair number would say something like "Yeah, at least I can work on open source projects".

If anyone at Facebook reading this wants to go for a dare, why don't you try dropping support for a high profile open source project like ReactJS and see if that affects the candidates entering your pipeline.

[lhorie]

> why don't you try dropping support

I hear that sort of happened w/ ReasonML. Apparently Jordan still maintains it (because he's a prolific OSS guy like that), but FB itself is not investing in it, and is instead doubling down on Flow.

Jest is another project that largely yielded governance to its community.

You gotta understand that the number one incentive for someone to interview at FB is compensation. OSS opportunities are often a minor perk, and many (most?) employees don't do high profile OSS at all.

[turbo_fart_box]

Doubling down on flow? Has TS not won?

[lhorie]

Not at Facebook. Yes elsewhere

[boxy_brown]

Can you share some examples?

[lhorie]

I think parent means working on open source tasks is often "thankless" in the sense that it's extra work that doesn't necessarily benefit their employer.

[kderbyma]

That makes very little sense. They have use for it because it results in new features which are contributing to their business which would otherwise be both built and QCd by employees

[lhorie]

Some things align w internal priorities and get done, others are issues FB people have not run into and they ask for contributions from whoever is affected.

In my experience, it's a fairly common theme in projects like jest or yarn.

[anoncake]

If their work didn't benefit Facebook (or at least if Facebook didn't believe their work benefited it), they would not get paid for it.

Also: What kind of person feels bad because their work merely benefits society but not Facebook?

[lhorie]

If that entails working on OSS tasks on your personal time at the expense of spending time w/ family/friends (because you can't justify spending company time on it to your boss), I'd say a lot of people would choose to not "benefit society" / pamper demanding freeloaders / whatever you wanna call it.

[anoncake]

I fully understand why people would choose not to work for free. But that was not the question. Work that does not benefit your employer tends to be work that your employer does not pay you for, but they're not the same.