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I went in for an interview recently for the react core team and the guy who interviewed me said Facebook was trying to edge away from open source. He mentioned

I went in for an interview recently for the react core team and the guy who interviewed me said Facebook was trying to edge away from open source. He mentioned it’s not worth it to them as much as it was before. Too much to maintain.

imbiased 8y ago
A shame, in an ideal world there would be the benefit of outside contributions that made less internal work needed, so overall would be a win for Facebook. But probably this is related to Atom itself being taken over by VSCode, the number of users (and maybe contributors) appears to be going down. I wonder if Atom Xray will ever come out https://github.com/atom/xray https://github.com/atom/xray
- PurpleRamen 8y ago
  That is only true if the outside contributes things that facebooks actually needs and if they are on a level of quality which facebooks wants. Often enough projects grow beyond the initial goal and at the end the maintainer is buried in meaningless work (for his own goals) and can't focus anymore on his own important things.
  - imbiased 8y ago
    Good point. Although an OSS maintainer can be strict and refuse contribs on features they don't want to support. And by breaking down Nuclide, some individual packages like the Python debugger etc, probably can be very well defined and have a significant overlap between what they (Facebook) and other companies want, without much room for deviation. As opposed to say the general VCS support (they mostly want Mercurial that Facebook uses internally, whereas most outside users use git). It still needs your requisite that contribs are of high quality.
booleandilemma 8y ago
It seems FB is underestimating the PR value that supporting open source brings. Microsoft, on the other hand, seems to understand it well.
- aplummer 8y ago
  It's an IDE whose only existence was due to their _wildly_ popular open source software, so they seem to understand it pretty well...
bdcravens 8y ago
Perfectly rational. Obviously they want to keep React closer to the chest as that directly impacts their core product. Things on the periphery are probably better left to others; I'd imagine it's more effective to donate dollars than hours for those kinds of projects.
underwater 8y ago
I believe that their internal organisation has changed too. Product Infrastructure, who open sourced GraphQL, React, Relay, Flow, etc. was rolled into a core team, whose priorities are undoubtedly tied directly to internal a app metrics.
- sophiebits 8y ago
  No, our priorities for React and other libraries are not tied directly to internal app metrics.
  - Joakal 8y ago
    What are the React project priorities tied to?
  - underwater 8y ago
    Good to hear that's still the case. I'm particularly worried about Flow, given that it's generally not trending well against TypeScript in terms of adoption, and because the team has never been super-engaged with the open source community. Would Facebook consider publicly clarifying intent to support less successful projects into the next 12 to 24 months?
sophiebits 8y ago
I manage the React Core team. That sounds wrong to me. Facebook has not made any meaningful changes in its OSS strategy. It has always been the case that it takes energy to maintain projects in OSS and that for projects that are not used much by external folks it might not be worth the energy. However, we are continuing to develop React with OSS as a first class citizen, doubling down on our investment in React Native in open source, and likely to still open source new projects as they make sense.
- eloisant 8y ago
  So is there an "official" editor/IDE for React now? What's mostly used by the React team?
  - sophiebits 8y ago
    I think people on our team use VSCode, Sublime Text, and Vim. Almost all editors these days have good support for React, so we don't have any official one (nor do we feel the need to). VSCode has particularly good integration with TypeScript, so perhaps choose it if you are otherwise undecided.
    - imbiased 8y ago
      Thanks for sharing. Curious if Nuclide is omitted because it's a given, or isn't used much internally now (https://mobile.twitter.com/amasad/status/1072930703065501696 https://mobile.twitter.com/amasad/status/1072930703065501696)
    - dizzy3gg 8y ago
      Building an app with react native at the moment, the team uses VSCode & WebStorm. Why would TypeScript be the deciding factor?
      - Joakal 8y ago
        With a strongly typed codebase. VSC will advise with red squiggles straight away if a value gets a different type. But it is another tool for large codebases that requires more work, like tests. If it's a small web project, it's probably overkill.
saagarjha 8y ago
I’m surprised to see an engineer admit this during an interview (assuming it is true, sophiebits has mentioned that it she doesn’t agree with this). Presumably this is the time when you talk about how much cool open source work you do?
- ldiracdelta 8y ago
  An engineer at a big company is still just a dude or a gal. Not everyone in a multi-thousand person company will toe the company line or are in lock step.
- chillacy 8y ago
  Lying in the interview might bring them on but if they really want to do OSS and they don’t get that chance.. they’ll probably leave real soon, and then that’s wasted time onboarding someone.

imbiased 8y ago

A shame, in an ideal world there would be the benefit of outside contributions that made less internal work needed, so overall would be a win for Facebook. But probably this is related to Atom itself being taken over by VSCode, the number of users (and maybe contributors) appears to be going down. I wonder if Atom Xray will ever come out https://github.com/atom/xray https://github.com/atom/xray

PurpleRamen 8y ago
That is only true if the outside contributes things that facebooks actually needs and if they are on a level of quality which facebooks wants. Often enough projects grow beyond the initial goal and at the end the maintainer is buried in meaningless work (for his own goals) and can't focus anymore on his own important things.
- imbiased 8y ago
  Good point. Although an OSS maintainer can be strict and refuse contribs on features they don't want to support. And by breaking down Nuclide, some individual packages like the Python debugger etc, probably can be very well defined and have a significant overlap between what they (Facebook) and other companies want, without much room for deviation. As opposed to say the general VCS support (they mostly want Mercurial that Facebook uses internally, whereas most outside users use git). It still needs your requisite that contribs are of high quality.

booleandilemma 8y ago

It seems FB is underestimating the PR value that supporting open source brings. Microsoft, on the other hand, seems to understand it well.

aplummer 8y ago
It's an IDE whose only existence was due to their _wildly_ popular open source software, so they seem to understand it pretty well...

bdcravens 8y ago

Perfectly rational. Obviously they want to keep React closer to the chest as that directly impacts their core product. Things on the periphery are probably better left to others; I'd imagine it's more effective to donate dollars than hours for those kinds of projects.

underwater 8y ago

I believe that their internal organisation has changed too. Product Infrastructure, who open sourced GraphQL, React, Relay, Flow, etc. was rolled into a core team, whose priorities are undoubtedly tied directly to internal a app metrics.

sophiebits 8y ago
No, our priorities for React and other libraries are not tied directly to internal app metrics.
- Joakal 8y ago
  What are the React project priorities tied to?
- underwater 8y ago
  Good to hear that's still the case. I'm particularly worried about Flow, given that it's generally not trending well against TypeScript in terms of adoption, and because the team has never been super-engaged with the open source community. Would Facebook consider publicly clarifying intent to support less successful projects into the next 12 to 24 months?

sophiebits 8y ago

I manage the React Core team. That sounds wrong to me. Facebook has not made any meaningful changes in its OSS strategy. It has always been the case that it takes energy to maintain projects in OSS and that for projects that are not used much by external folks it might not be worth the energy. However, we are continuing to develop React with OSS as a first class citizen, doubling down on our investment in React Native in open source, and likely to still open source new projects as they make sense.

eloisant 8y ago
So is there an "official" editor/IDE for React now? What's mostly used by the React team?
- sophiebits 8y ago
  I think people on our team use VSCode, Sublime Text, and Vim. Almost all editors these days have good support for React, so we don't have any official one (nor do we feel the need to). VSCode has particularly good integration with TypeScript, so perhaps choose it if you are otherwise undecided.
  - imbiased 8y ago
    Thanks for sharing. Curious if Nuclide is omitted because it's a given, or isn't used much internally now (https://mobile.twitter.com/amasad/status/1072930703065501696 https://mobile.twitter.com/amasad/status/1072930703065501696)
  - dizzy3gg 8y ago
    Building an app with react native at the moment, the team uses VSCode & WebStorm. Why would TypeScript be the deciding factor?
    - Joakal 8y ago
      With a strongly typed codebase. VSC will advise with red squiggles straight away if a value gets a different type. But it is another tool for large codebases that requires more work, like tests. If it's a small web project, it's probably overkill.

saagarjha 8y ago

I’m surprised to see an engineer admit this during an interview (assuming it is true, sophiebits has mentioned that it she doesn’t agree with this). Presumably this is the time when you talk about how much cool open source work you do?

ldiracdelta 8y ago
An engineer at a big company is still just a dude or a gal. Not everyone in a multi-thousand person company will toe the company line or are in lock step.
chillacy 8y ago
Lying in the interview might bring them on but if they really want to do OSS and they don’t get that chance.. they’ll probably leave real soon, and then that’s wasted time onboarding someone.