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Can someone enlighten me to the possible motivations behind a facebook employee doing such a thing. Since I don't much experience in open source, from my humble

Can someone enlighten me to the possible motivations behind a facebook employee doing such a thing. Since I don't much experience in open source, from my humble understanding it could be to hijack the project and nudge or explicitly steer the project and open source contributions in the more favorable direction.(?)

Master_Odin 6y ago
The original project was a GH app. The new codebase is a GH action. My guess is FB wants to consolidate what they can to GH actions, which are easier to manage and such.
kodah 6y ago
Not necessarily. Usually these kind of scenarios boil down to the fact that a lot of corporate devs (even ones that participate in open source) do not really understand open source from a community perspective. They understand it from a corporate perspective and it's this that causes some rub. Where big, multi-million dollar companies think, "A fork is a fork and that's part of open source ethos!" they lack the relative introspection to see how Amazon's fork is relatively different from kodah's, especially if you put a business case behind it. This lack of mindfulness largely gets perceived as an affront on the open source community and it's values. This was a GitHub issue bot, I doubt this is an instance of Facebook trying to strong-arm competition. It's more likely that Facebook had a need for this, this engineer wanted the code in GitHub actions for some reason and quickly wrote it. Seems reasonable and fully within his rights working in FOSS. What was missed by corporate governance is attribution for where the code was inspired by. Sure, you likely can't get in legal trouble here, but ethics say you should document where your inspiration came from.
elliot07 6y ago
My guess is that the Facebook employee thought it was simply not worth using an untrusted (22 stars) library like this for the project. Maybe there was some additional feature where they just didn't want to deal with asking the original author of the idea and wanted to build themselves, but I'm guessing because the project is going to have significant usage of this (and probably growing as more complicated use cases come up), in house control is easier to manage (eg. imagine the case where the repo goes offline or something). Also, it doesn't look like this was 'Facebook inspired', but done on the developer's own time. Likely some weekend project because they were bored. I really don't think this is done in malice like some other comments hint at.
ris 6y ago
Take a look at the project in question. It's a fairly straightforward github action. I imagine facebook has some (probably quite sensible) policy that they shouldn't rely on random third-party actions, and rather than just forking it they thought they'd build it to better suit their needs. Life is stressful enough working at a large org trying to get real work done without worrying that some author has decided to claim the rights over an extremely generic and obvious name. Launching a new product using the extremely unique name of an existing open source project this is not.

Master_Odin 6y ago

The original project was a GH app. The new codebase is a GH action. My guess is FB wants to consolidate what they can to GH actions, which are easier to manage and such.

kodah 6y ago

Not necessarily. Usually these kind of scenarios boil down to the fact that a lot of corporate devs (even ones that participate in open source) do not really understand open source from a community perspective. They understand it from a corporate perspective and it's this that causes some rub. Where big, multi-million dollar companies think, "A fork is a fork and that's part of open source ethos!" they lack the relative introspection to see how Amazon's fork is relatively different from kodah's, especially if you put a business case behind it. This lack of mindfulness largely gets perceived as an affront on the open source community and it's values. This was a GitHub issue bot, I doubt this is an instance of Facebook trying to strong-arm competition. It's more likely that Facebook had a need for this, this engineer wanted the code in GitHub actions for some reason and quickly wrote it. Seems reasonable and fully within his rights working in FOSS. What was missed by corporate governance is attribution for where the code was inspired by. Sure, you likely can't get in legal trouble here, but ethics say you should document where your inspiration came from.

elliot07 6y ago

My guess is that the Facebook employee thought it was simply not worth using an untrusted (22 stars) library like this for the project. Maybe there was some additional feature where they just didn't want to deal with asking the original author of the idea and wanted to build themselves, but I'm guessing because the project is going to have significant usage of this (and probably growing as more complicated use cases come up), in house control is easier to manage (eg. imagine the case where the repo goes offline or something). Also, it doesn't look like this was 'Facebook inspired', but done on the developer's own time. Likely some weekend project because they were bored. I really don't think this is done in malice like some other comments hint at.

ris 6y ago

Take a look at the project in question. It's a fairly straightforward github action. I imagine facebook has some (probably quite sensible) policy that they shouldn't rely on random third-party actions, and rather than just forking it they thought they'd build it to better suit their needs. Life is stressful enough working at a large org trying to get real work done without worrying that some author has decided to claim the rights over an extremely generic and obvious name. Launching a new product using the extremely unique name of an existing open source project this is not.