[tayo42]

I feel kind of ridiculous for having this view point, but I have co workers who keep advocating for using facebook open source stuff. I kind of want to push back on these suggestions, not really for anything technical, I just no longer think facebook or google are even neutral companies. Something just doesn't really feel right about continuing to use facebook open source stuff. Maybe if it was developed by facebook but run by some neutral organization now would be fine. But having the company all over it doesn't feel right.

I think a lot of people are just into solving tech problems without considering much else.

There's a large part of open source that seems to just exist for large corporations and solving corporate problems for free.

[wyldfire]

> advocating for using facebook open source stuff.

IMO truly Open Source software that comes out of FB and GOOG are the silver lining - the output from them that you should consume guilt-free.

For a while IIRC FB had some onerous terms levied on their Open Source repos, I'm not sure if that's changed. But if they have sane licenses, we should embrace this work (while still rejecting their misdeeds).

[tayo42]

I think there's potential for consequences just blindly using the stuff they give away. Its advertising for them. "The best and most innovative work here, look what they do!". Now Facebook is in all of our web frontends now with react, google is in all of our data centers with Kubernetes. Can you even be innovative and get traction anymore without corporate backing? I'm skeptical a project like Linux could take off in our current computing world. Sorry a little ranty but I don't see why we need to keep giving these companies even more share of the tech world, even if they give it away for free.

[fallingknife]

That's sort of a ridiculous standard. What counts as "corporate backing?" The Intel/AMD chips in your servers? AWS/GCP/Azure that hosts them? The cable companies that own the fiber your data moves over? Businesses don't, and never have, existed in a vacuum. Why draw the line at frameworks like React?

[tayo42]

IDK why you think im drawing the line at frameworks? I'm just highlighting it in this situation. I cant rant about everything negative thing corporations do, Ill never be done. But those examples aren't remotely the same. Intel and AMD is a healthy rivalry to have, for awhile AMD wasn't even competitive. Those companies arent trying to reach into every segment of the world. Cable company monopolies have been beat to death, and are an obvious problem so Im unsure why your even bringing it up? But comcast isn't even comparable to the reach google or facebook has. Something like 1/3 of the world in on facebook, you really want to compare that to American cable companies?

[tarsinge]

And amazingly it is self inflicted by peer pressure, because it’s absolutely possible to build great things without React or Kubernetes. I don’t care because I have my own company now (and yet it’s an everyday to educate both clients and junior devs), but if I were still mainly a dev I would seriously hurt my resume. I don’t know if it’s conscious or not on their part, but the tech marketing achievement is both impressive and disappointing.

[znpy]

I'm starting to feel that "Open Soruce" is somehow beginning to become a cancer. We should really aim for Free Software, not just "Open Source".

Grafana chose to relicense as Affero GPL, whereas Elastic has been kinda doomed by its own homemade license.

We'll see, I guess?

[ItsMonkk]

pg has a great article on AirBnB bootstrapping their business by doing things that don't scale. He says that they would go door to door and early on would take pictures of the rooms so that their on-boarding was easier. What I have come to realize is that all businesses do things that don't scale, and not just during the bootstrap process.

Open Source software scales perfectly, and therefore is worthless.

The naive public view of Google is that they are a Search company. The HN take is that Google is not a Search company, they are what they make their money in, which is Advertising. My claim in this comment is a company is whatever they do that doesn't scale. Google is a tracking company. They use that tracking to produce better search results, which they monetize by selling advertising.

It's the tracking that doesn't scale well. And Google knows this, and that's why their Search results punish slow loading pages. They want their tracker(which loads slowly) to be the only tracker. If all sites puts 25 different trackers all with their different stacks on a website, they would lose their 'doesn't scale' property. They then push this even further, by taking control of your browser with Chrome and your device with Android, which also doesn't scale. The market will never allow 100 browsers or 100 mobile operating systems. Developers Developers Developers after all.

So we can see that every company is what the things they do that don't scale. Once they have that, they constrain it and hold it within their walled garden, and from there they can bring in Open Source software. In essence Open Source Software allows the area of the garden to grow. Once OSS grows to being able to do anything that it can possibly do, we will still be constrained to the things that don't scale. These things will allow the companies to enforce monopoly rents within their walled gardens.

[lrvick]

Facebook and Google contribute heavily to the Linux kernel. Much of the security work in the kernel is a direct result of them paying people to work on it. Good code should not be rejected because evil companies happened to be one of the financial backers.

To be clear, I hate both companies and avoid their proprietary offerings at almost all costs but when they happen to do something not evil, even for selfish reasons like good PR, I take it. I will also still be sure and remind everyone they are still evil every chance I get.

I hate Microsoft too but if I was in a poor country with malaria I would be thankful for the help from their founder.

[open-source-ux]

"I kind of want to push back on these suggestions..."

What about programming languages? Go is open source and has benefitted enormously from support and funding from Google. That association has helped the language grow and attract developers. In fact, new(ish) languages with large corporate benefactors generally thrive compared to open source languages that have to scrape funding together piecemeal from different sources.

I think the popularity of some programming languages is buoyed by corporate sponsorship or the association with a company. This is not a bad thing, it just means the promise in other languages is harder to discern because they do not enjoy the same financial support, and thus struggle to attract new developers.

(I recently posted a Ask HN on this very topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27043717)

[genocidicbunny]

I'm in a similar position. There are several Google and FB open source projects that not only some of my co workers have advocated for, but that I would myself actually like to make some use of.

On the one hand, I think consuming their truly open source projects is a little bit of sticking it to the man -- you're getting for free something they spent money and time on.

But on the other hand, mindshare is a thing, and by using their products, even if truly open source, I am helping increase it.

For my own purposes, I have not used the Google or FB heritage of a given open source project to be an automatic disqualifier, but it is definitely a negative. If there are technically-comparable alternatives, I tend to lean towards those.

[taffronaut]

Another route is to lobby those projects to adopt an open governance model. This effectively puts the management of the project at arm's length from the corporate parent. It's a trade-off for them to get more engagement vs rescinding control. There are a number of hosting organisations that take this kind of thing on: Linux Foundation, Linaro, Eclipse.