[guessmyname]

What does “web text editor framework that powers Facebook” actually mean?

I don’t use Facebook, but AFAIK, there are no “blog features” in the platform, are there?

Other than a WYSIWYG editor [1], what other use cases do you intend this project for?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG

[chii]

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14838232

> The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up [only on Windows XP.]

so it is the same with the modern day web frameworks as it is in the old days of windows and microsoft's dominance.

Joel Spolsky was as right in early 2002 as he is right in 2022.

[groby_b]

Joel Spolsky wasn't particularly right in 2002, and he hasn't gotten more relevant with age.

As for this particular article, what is your criticism? That FB makes a rich text editor available as open source (under the MIT license)? How on earth does that mean "companies have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs"?

You can always roll your own, or use one of the many others available if this one doesn't taste right? (Also: Who on earth gains a competitive advantage from having a text editor, in 2022?)

[chii]

> How on earth does that mean "companies have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs"?

The fact that there's draft.js, and a myriad of other existing editor libraries out there already, all of which could've been contributed to instead.

If a startup chose to base their technology on a library that is released by a major corporation, they face the risk of getting "rug pulled" (or the library updates incompatibly and now you're locked in either to using the old version, or painful upgrade to the new version).

Of course, they don't have to choose to use such a library, but if they don't then there's a community of people who then questions them on why they are spending time replicating a technology.

The point is, if a startup chose to use this library, they face the risk of having to expend time keeping up in pace (and associated cost of doing so) with facebook.

This equivalent scenario exists in someone writing against libraries released by microsoft on windows, and that's what spolsky is complaining about.

[groby_b]

This is no different than choosing a volunteer-based OSS solution or rolling your own. If you need things that are specific to your use case, you'll always need to shoulder the cost.

That is no different from something you do yourself, either. What you call "rug pull" is merely the point where the solution you got for free suddenly costs as much to maintain as your inhouse solution.

[chii]

> This is no different than choosing a volunteer-based OSS solution

the big difference with a true volunteer based OSS solution, like for example, linux, is that there's many individuals involved. The decision making in that project then won't turn into what spolsky said. I wouldn't imagine the linux maintainers "rug pull", but i can imagine facebook doing a rug pull.

[groby_b]

Oh please. Any project that isn't under your direct control will at some point "rug pull", because they will make a decision that's different from what you'd have preferred.

Major controversies that come to mind around Linux pretty much immediately are systemd, Wayland, the sound server wars. I also vaguely recall major back and forth around memory management. That's normal and expected. That's why you make "buy vs build" decisions, and any third party package is susceptible to that.

And "many individuals involved" means absolutely nothing - do you honestly believe that somehow this editor is a lone work of genius? Or that companies somehow have a coherent vision for every single detail? Have you ever worked in a large company?

[singaporecode]

If you are using someone else’s work for free, then what’s there to complain?

[code_biologist]

See also “nerd sniping”: https://xkcd.com/356/

[dbbk]

What are you on about