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To write React Facebook needed 20 years of R&D done by open source... jquery, mootools, long list of dead stuff today we needed to learn from. If Facebook need

To write React Facebook needed 20 years of R&D done by open source... jquery, mootools, long list of dead stuff today we needed to learn from. If Facebook needs 1000 projects to show them how to produce the best React then they need to keep 1000 projects in the pipelines so they can build the best successor to current solutions too. That's why they need to fund open source.

kortilla 7y ago
No they don’t. They didn’t find any of those projects and it worked out quite well. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
- benologist 7y ago
  They need all those projects to surface good ideas and they need all that parallelism to identify mistakes they can avoid. Without it what do they base decisions on? React would be guesswork or an internal tool built in isolation that only solves their specific problems if even that good. This is how software is evolving. If there is no parallel evolution it will take 1000x longer to do so. If it takes 1000x longer to evolve it takes 1000x longer to invent opportunity and savings for FAANG.
  - kortilla 7y ago
    And you have made no arguments supporting the notion that they need to fund open source for that to happen.
root_axis 7y ago
This is true of all software whether you're Facebook or a solo open-source developer; we all stand on the shoulders of giants, literally nobody doing work today can claim otherwise. > That's why they need to fund open source. They do. They pay employees to work on software they contribute to the open-source community. To build React, Facebook had to rely on "20 years of R&D" but also millions of dollars in engineering hours.
- benologist 7y ago
  Funding open source != paying thirty people a few hundred grand and the thousands they depend on nothing. It is an obvious resource allocation problem. Why should the resources not come from the companies extracting the most cash value from open source?
  - root_axis 7y ago
    Those companies contribute back monumental open source projects that would simply never exist without the level of funding, organization, and real business knowledge that those companies provide. The amount of open-source code given away freely by FAANG and similar corporations is worth hundreds of billions of dollars to the wider community. Even much of the software itself is produced with open-source languages made possible by corporate sponsorship. All that open-source work contributes to the richness of the ecosystem just like everything that came before it, empowering the next generation to continue the cycle going forward.
    - benologist 7y ago
      Nobody is questioning that they give some software back but giving software back simply does not fund open source. Most people cannot convert their contributions into money as deftly as FAANG has converted 10,000s of people's contributions into a quarter trillion dollars. It does not fund the tools that power their current open source projects. It does not fund the tools their next open source projects will use. It does not fund the brilliance their next open source projects will iterate on. It does not fund the mistakes their next open source projects will know to avoid. They need all of that stuff before they have even a clue what to make next, and they need the open source community to try everything a hundred different ways to see which is good. We will still be arguing about this in twenty years as open source transitions into a mostly Indo-Chino-Russo-African dominated landscape because western developers can't afford to work on open source unless it's through their employing-FAANG company. Long before that all the current FAANG open source we're supposed to be grateful to receive instead of funding will be obsoleted and tossed aside because only a handful of ideas in it actually mattered after all.

kortilla 7y ago

No they don’t. They didn’t find any of those projects and it worked out quite well. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

benologist 7y ago
They need all those projects to surface good ideas and they need all that parallelism to identify mistakes they can avoid. Without it what do they base decisions on? React would be guesswork or an internal tool built in isolation that only solves their specific problems if even that good. This is how software is evolving. If there is no parallel evolution it will take 1000x longer to do so. If it takes 1000x longer to evolve it takes 1000x longer to invent opportunity and savings for FAANG.
- kortilla 7y ago
  And you have made no arguments supporting the notion that they need to fund open source for that to happen.

root_axis 7y ago

This is true of all software whether you're Facebook or a solo open-source developer; we all stand on the shoulders of giants, literally nobody doing work today can claim otherwise. > That's why they need to fund open source. They do. They pay employees to work on software they contribute to the open-source community. To build React, Facebook had to rely on "20 years of R&D" but also millions of dollars in engineering hours.

benologist 7y ago
Funding open source != paying thirty people a few hundred grand and the thousands they depend on nothing. It is an obvious resource allocation problem. Why should the resources not come from the companies extracting the most cash value from open source?
- root_axis 7y ago
  Those companies contribute back monumental open source projects that would simply never exist without the level of funding, organization, and real business knowledge that those companies provide. The amount of open-source code given away freely by FAANG and similar corporations is worth hundreds of billions of dollars to the wider community. Even much of the software itself is produced with open-source languages made possible by corporate sponsorship. All that open-source work contributes to the richness of the ecosystem just like everything that came before it, empowering the next generation to continue the cycle going forward.
  - benologist 7y ago
    Nobody is questioning that they give some software back but giving software back simply does not fund open source. Most people cannot convert their contributions into money as deftly as FAANG has converted 10,000s of people's contributions into a quarter trillion dollars. It does not fund the tools that power their current open source projects. It does not fund the tools their next open source projects will use. It does not fund the brilliance their next open source projects will iterate on. It does not fund the mistakes their next open source projects will know to avoid. They need all of that stuff before they have even a clue what to make next, and they need the open source community to try everything a hundred different ways to see which is good. We will still be arguing about this in twenty years as open source transitions into a mostly Indo-Chino-Russo-African dominated landscape because western developers can't afford to work on open source unless it's through their employing-FAANG company. Long before that all the current FAANG open source we're supposed to be grateful to receive instead of funding will be obsoleted and tossed aside because only a handful of ideas in it actually mattered after all.