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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

I 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.

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A 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.

The 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.

I 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.

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