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Meta is a backer of the Linux Foundation which OpenJS is a part of and has donated $22,000 to the Jest Open Collective which was created by Meta in 2016 to supp
by rickhanlonii 4y ago
Meta is a backer of the Linux Foundation which OpenJS is a part of and has donated $22,000 to the Jest Open Collective which was created by Meta in 2016 to support non-employee Jest contributors. Jest actually has all the funds we need right now and our bigger issue is finding ways to spend it!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lloydatkinson 4y agoIs that it? Facebook is a huge corporation, that must have React app after React app using Jest, and they are paying volunteers to work on it now? With a fraction of what a single developers average salary is?
- edgyquant 4y agoFacebook created jest dude, they’ve invested more than that 26,000. That’s also almost half of the total donations.
- MoSattler 4y agoI didn't know they had so little donations. It's a super important building block of the industry, and yet the industry doesn't even pay a single developers salary for it?
- theptip 4y agoFacebook built this, with engineers that they were paying a salary to. It’s 100% industry-funded.
- samhw 4y agoI think they meant 'the rest of the industry'?
- MoSattler 4y agoExactly
- theptip 4y agoWhy would anyone else in the industry contribute resource to a FB-owned project with closed governance? They are in the bottom five companies in the world that need help with the open source projects they maintain. I get what you are lamenting in general, I would like to see OpenSSL or Django or perhaps even Linux better funded for example. It just seems to me that this is not a case where any lamenting is justified. If the newly-community-owned Jest doesn’t get investment, then sure, that would be lamentable. But that hasn’t happened yet. Indeed, FB divesting ownership was a necessary condition for any serious outside investment to occur, IMO.
- MoSattler 4y agoI was talking about the Linux Foundation of the original comment. Now reading back, I realise that I might have gotten confused and took the numbers that were referring to the Facebook project, thinking it was the Linux donations. Sorry for the confusion.
- rickhanlonii 4y agoWe don't really need the funds and can't spent the ones we have, so we haven't pushed for more donations over the years.
- joshmanders 4y agoYou're vastly ignoring the fact that Meta paid full time salaries for developers who worked exclusively on it for years. Overall their financial contributions could be in the millions. Don't think about the small amount they've done recently.
- MoSattler 4y agoI was referring to the industry as a whole. Meta seems to be an outlier.
- seattle_spring 4y agoI really dislike the attitude of complaining that someone hasn't given "enough", especially when they've already given more than almost anyone else.
- Kaze404 4y agoThis isn't some_one_, it's some_thing_. I share your sentiment when it comes to individuals but extending the same sympathy to a company, especially one the size of Facebook, doesn't make sense imo.
- samhw 4y agoIt's not a question of 'sympathy', it's a question of recognising the neutral fact that a company providing its code to you free of charge is not further obligated - irrespective of whether you happen to like or dislike that company - to spend what you deem to be an 'appropriate' amount on maintaining the free software they provide you. (And, even if any of the foregoing made any sense, the notion that an 'appropriate' amount is somehow measured relative to the company's revenue, rather than the factual costs of maintaining the software, is disqualifyingly silly in its own right.)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lloydatkinson 4y agoThis isn't some random small library. It is/was a library developed by a FAANG company that underpins a large part of the JS ecosystem that they were paying their full time employees to work on.
- samhw 4y agoThey are providing their code to you free of charge. They are already doing you a kindness. So certainly they are under no obligation to spend $22k, let alone more than that. Christ, attitudes towards open source have become seriously warped over the last few years.
- woodruffw 4y agoI will point out, as an open source maintainer: someone giving you code "free of charge" is the same thing as them giving you a free puppy: everybody loves puppies, but they are absolutely not free to maintain. This isn't meant to imply that Meta is, in this instance, offloading costs onto the community. But it's a tried-and-true tradition.
- samhw 4y agoA white elephant, basically, you mean? I definitely understand that, but I'm not sure it applies here. Jest and React are exceptionally mature and well-maintained pieces of software. Many a startup has been built by gluing React to Express and Postgres with nary a glimmer of skill required. Hell, it has its own developer tools built into Chrome.
- woodruffw 4y agoThe pernicious thing about "mature and well-maintained" pieces of software is that their maintenance becomes bursty: they don't need anything for years, until something needs changing/fixing this instant. Log4j is the canonical example of this: it's such a boring piece of substrate that nobody noticed that it was effectively maintained by one person and had grown all kinds of configurable knobs and dials over the years. Ultimately, I'm not saying that Meta is in the wrong here. But "here's a cash infusion with no long-term funding or staff commitment" is the kind of general mispattern that we're seeing w/r/t corporate open source.
- samhw 4y agoI just don't see how it's less valuable than not using it. That seems analytically true to me: if ever the debits do outweigh the credits, then one simply doesn't use it. After all, it's not like it's a library doing some magical thing; it's a framework which operates on code written to a certain interface, and for which alternative 'compilers' (e.g. Preact) already exist.
- rickhanlonii 4y agoFrom Jest's perspective, that amount is way over what we've needed to date.