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Comment by arenaninja | Hacker News Reader

This is a common gripe with a lot of open source software, but from issues I've had to track down, Facebook is downright inviting on saying if you have an issue and you know how to fix it, submit a PR and we'll merge it.

Their priorities may not align with yours, but it's not such a bad policy. If you don't like it, fork it?

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They will absolutely merge in fixes, though they may well not be timely if they're not from internal engineers. I've had broken behaviour sit in a PR for over 6 months before.

They're not alone:

Recently watched Angular Material first dismiss a glaring problem with datepicker, then sit on their hands [0] while some bloke made a complete fix, adjusting anything they brought up, then sit on their hands again [1] after it was finished until someone started building pressure again.

[0][1]: I didn't actually verify that. They might have had some really busy days. Point is they stuck to Google communication policy: try to not say anything at all.

"as long as you sign our CLA, which requires you give our lawyers your personal information, including information that you might not have. Don't have a phone or permanent address? hahahaha get lost".

Facebook's lawyers did some very questionable things to "open source" here.

That's how good IP hygiene works. Blame the legal system.

No, it's not. It's only how IP hygiene works if you want to abuse your contributors and request rights that realistically should _never_ be given.

They need to be absolutely sure that accepting contributing is not going to bite them,so you have to sign over all rights to the code to the project owner. They own the code from that point on, not you. This is standard behaviour.

Facebook differs from the standard in that they require your address, but I assume that is to make sure the CLA has the correct form

Signing over rights is one thing. Discriminating against people without a permanent address, or a phone, or any other person who can afford a laptop and not much else, and has high value contributions to make if only they would be accepted, is being an ass to humanity and you should feel bad and change that.

They even require you to sign their CLA just for README.md updates - that's not "being safe", that's "being willingly idiotic".

Facebook legal is not interested in changing the CLA requirements to something that doesn't discriminate, and despite the rather large number of people who work on their open source projects, who would all love for that CLA to fuck off so they can do open source properly, Facebook as an organisation is still not a good citizen in the open source space. They're still trying to put up a walled garden as much as they legally can, even if you think you can't see the wall anymore.

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