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I'm upvoting not because I agree (I fundamentally don't!) but because it's important to our entire industry that we develop quantitative counterarguments to the

by btown 8y ago

I'm upvoting not because I agree (I fundamentally don't!) but because it's important to our entire industry that we develop quantitative counterarguments to these types of articles. Interestingly, it's possible that Microsoft will soon have the best concrete numbers here; as it moves more and more towards open-sourcing key components of their developer tooling, it will be able to compare everything from talent pipelines to internal developer productivity before and after the sea change. That said, could Facebook capture more of the "React consulting and services" market? Could it, for instance, offer hosting for component sandboxes, or develop paid tooling that builds on React for rapid line-of-business application development? Possibly, but it would be such a drop in the bucket compared to any other use of a Facebook engineer, that it's not worthwhile. There's value to shareholders in a company, however large, having a "cohesive focus" in its lines of business.

astorplaceCLI 8y ago
Great points
minimaxir 8y ago
I'm all for well-researched cost/benefit analyses. This ain't it, though.
astorplaceCLI 8y ago
You might like this https://medium.com/@daxaxelrod/facebook-destroys-billions-of-dollars-of-shareholder-value-with-their-open-source-projects-part-10947d5e8f1a https://medium.com/@daxaxelrod/facebook-destroys-billions-of...
- btown 8y ago
  I'm guessing you're OP? I have to say, I've never seen someone create a full DCF in response to an internet comment I've made! At a high level, it's a really cool build you've put together. You might consider writing down some of your methodology and assumptions in the blog post, as it's unclear from the post alone where those multi-billion figures come from. And someone could reasonably argue that there's overlap between the categories you've chosen; for instance, is a big part of the goodwill value of a NPM download realized in the improvements to recruitment and code quality? Even so, even if many of the assumptions are inaccurate, the order of magnitude may very well be correct... and if so, it does speak to the open-sourcing of React being a very valuable move for FB, even if payoff is spread out over time. Taking a step back, I think you'll find a big segment of Hacker News really dislikes clickbait in the way you titled and structured the first blog post. It's a shame, because I think your devil's-advocate analysis deserves more attention. Certainly the followup deserves discussion.
  - astorplaceCLI 8y ago
    Thanks for your feedback! I think it would be cool to do some more analysis of the technology industry like what's the NPV of sponsoring a hackathon or a conference? Does it matter what type of company you are and things like that? Interesting, I thought of the NPM aspect as separate and didn't account for the fact that as a repo gets more popular, the higher the chance for better code quality. I really regret the clickbait and won't be doing that again in the future. I think the way that people responding means the future of open source is bright however.

by btown 8y ago

astorplaceCLI 8y ago

Great points

minimaxir 8y ago

I'm all for well-researched cost/benefit analyses. This ain't it, though.

astorplaceCLI 8y ago

You might like this https://medium.com/@daxaxelrod/facebook-destroys-billions-of-dollars-of-shareholder-value-with-their-open-source-projects-part-10947d5e8f1a https://medium.com/@daxaxelrod/facebook-destroys-billions-of...

btown 8y ago
I'm guessing you're OP? I have to say, I've never seen someone create a full DCF in response to an internet comment I've made! At a high level, it's a really cool build you've put together. You might consider writing down some of your methodology and assumptions in the blog post, as it's unclear from the post alone where those multi-billion figures come from. And someone could reasonably argue that there's overlap between the categories you've chosen; for instance, is a big part of the goodwill value of a NPM download realized in the improvements to recruitment and code quality? Even so, even if many of the assumptions are inaccurate, the order of magnitude may very well be correct... and if so, it does speak to the open-sourcing of React being a very valuable move for FB, even if payoff is spread out over time. Taking a step back, I think you'll find a big segment of Hacker News really dislikes clickbait in the way you titled and structured the first blog post. It's a shame, because I think your devil's-advocate analysis deserves more attention. Certainly the followup deserves discussion.
- astorplaceCLI 8y ago
  Thanks for your feedback! I think it would be cool to do some more analysis of the technology industry like what's the NPV of sponsoring a hackathon or a conference? Does it matter what type of company you are and things like that? Interesting, I thought of the NPM aspect as separate and didn't account for the fact that as a repo gets more popular, the higher the chance for better code quality. I really regret the clickbait and won't be doing that again in the future. I think the way that people responding means the future of open source is bright however.