[samhw]

They are providing their code to you free of charge. They are already doing you a kindness. So certainly they are under no obligation to spend $22k, let alone more than that. Christ, attitudes towards open source have become seriously warped over the last few years.

[woodruffw]

I will point out, as an open source maintainer: someone giving you code "free of charge" is the same thing as them giving you a free puppy: everybody loves puppies, but they are absolutely not free to maintain.

This isn't meant to imply that Meta is, in this instance, offloading costs onto the community. But it's a tried-and-true tradition.

[samhw]

A white elephant, basically, you mean? I definitely understand that, but I'm not sure it applies here. Jest and React are exceptionally mature and well-maintained pieces of software. Many a startup has been built by gluing React to Express and Postgres with nary a glimmer of skill required. Hell, it has its own developer tools built into Chrome.

[woodruffw]

The pernicious thing about "mature and well-maintained" pieces of software is that their maintenance becomes bursty: they don't need anything for years, until something needs changing/fixing this instant.

Log4j is the canonical example of this: it's such a boring piece of substrate that nobody noticed that it was effectively maintained by one person and had grown all kinds of configurable knobs and dials over the years.

Ultimately, I'm not saying that Meta is in the wrong here. But "here's a cash infusion with no long-term funding or staff commitment" is the kind of general mispattern that we're seeing w/r/t corporate open source.

[samhw]

I just don't see how it's less valuable than not using it. That seems analytically true to me: if ever the debits do outweigh the credits, then one simply doesn't use it. After all, it's not like it's a library doing some magical thing; it's a framework which operates on code written to a certain interface, and for which alternative 'compilers' (e.g. Preact) already exist.

[lloydatkinson]

And? They were presumably paying at one point their own developers full time salaries while working on Jest and now Jest has been cast off to somewhere else and suddenly any expected future contributors deserve, in comparison, pennies? All while still using Jest themselves internally.

[samhw]

> any expected future contributors deserve, in comparison, pennies?

No, they don't deserve pennies. Facebook has given its code to the world - if anyone wants to keep that code maintained, then they can do so, but (I'd have thought needless to say) Facebook does not owe them a penny to maintain it just because they were kind enough to donate that version of their code. They can update it if they benefit from doing so.

Seriously, is this where we've got to? You can't open source your code unless you're able to pay for its maintenance in perpetuity? How is this in the spirit of openness? And, more to the point, how in the hell does this (incomprehensibly entitled) attitude encourage open source development?

[gowld]

> any expected future contributors

no such thing

[lloydatkinson]

Insightful.

[cute_boi]

Well, they are also benefitting from it, right? Its a symbiotic relationship. They get huge marketing PR from it.

Billionaire also donates million of dollars....

[samhw]

And good for them, but that doesn't affect the fact that they are doing you (/me, us) a favour, an act of supererogation.

In any case, my point isn't really about whether they are being kind or not. That's a fortiori. It's that they certainly aren't under any obligation to provide it, nor to maintain it on account of having provided it.

(Although to respond to your precise point: I'm severely doubtful of your claim that Facebook gets 'huge marketing PR' from an open source library. No one is signing up to Facebook because of the [apparently-existent] 'huge marketing' of the fact that they wrote React.)