Facebook has revenue greater than the GDP of all but 67 countries. Allowing 10 engineers to give away some crap for free doesn't quite balance the scales imo.
Facebook has revenue greater than the GDP of all but 67 countries. Allowing 10 engineers to give away some crap for free doesn't quite balance the scales imo.
React
PyTorch
Flow
React Native
Folly
RocksDB
llama
HHVM
Relay
Fresco
zstd
Buck
Sapling
Redex
JSX
infer
If you're a front-end engineer or dealing with web technologies, Facebook has repeatedly pulled the football away.
You're free to fork these repos and maintain them yourself if you'd like, and that freedom exists only because the code was made available under a FOSS license in the first place.
The alternative to this situation is not "open source code maintained in perpetuity", but "code that was never made open source in the first place".
There's no obligation for maintaining or ensuring that the open source code remains useful to you, so the criticism that projects are being open sourced and ignored might be valid, but the criticism that Facebook doesn't release major projects as FOSS is not.
We've all been spoiled by the hard work people have been putting in maintaining their FOSS repos, to the point where we now expect it. Most FOSS licenses include wording such as: THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” and that's what these repos are: code provided to you as is, free of charge and no strings attached (other than what the license specifies).
We’ve all seen fauxpen source projects close up shop immediately after their corporate developer deems them useless. Or better yet, actively reject all external contributions.
If they can do it, it's OSS through and through.
If the company decides to withdraw support and the project dies, it's not the fault of the company. The community was just not interested in embracing it.
The free software definition presents the criteria for whether a particular software program qualifies as free software.
A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:
* The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
* The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2)
* The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3).
By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
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Facebook's utility for me is now near zero, possibly negative. I'm only there because mom is there. Mom's only there because her friends are there.
Moving out of that morass - at least, until mom stops using computers is impossible.
At least with Amazon, Google, Netflix, Apple, Microsoft, etc, I (currently) have meaningful alternatives.
Network effects suck.
Why should that keep you there, though? She's your mother. Surely, you can talk with her directly even if she is on Facebook.
How this is legal is astonishing.