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I agree that this is a common concern with Google products, but I can't help but wonder if spinning Flutter out of Google would just end up being a vindication
by saghm 3y ago
I agree that this is a common concern with Google products, but I can't help but wonder if spinning Flutter out of Google would just end up being a vindication of those concerns rather than mitigation. If tomorrow Google came out and said that Flutter was being moved from Google ownership into a non-profit, I'm struggling to imagine that the community response would be "oh good, this shows that Google has a long-term commitment to Flutter" rather than people more cynically viewing it as yet another instance of Google shutting down a product, just with an attempt to avoid the PR repercussions. If Google really does care about it in the long term, I'm not really sure there's any way to win the debate about their stewardship, so they might as well just keep their heads down and focus on continuing work on it, and maybe someday if they do that long enough they might be able to win some trust back.
- pas 3y agoit's a hard problem, because when Google cares it might not be good for users of the various projects/tools/languages. these projects has specific goals (that serve Google's high-level goals in various ways) and circumstances (which many times lead to significantly different engineering trade-offs). Google starts projects with a lot of initial investment (new language/compiler/toolset/SDK/std-lib/frontend-component-library), but then their boldness almost disappears, and it takes a lot of time for them to finally catch-up, and on top of that they usually take a long time to "care" about things important for users (non-google developers). for their care/support/long-term-commitment to matter, first they (would) need to position themselves as downstream users of Flutter, and for that they first need to transform leadership into a community-driven something.