Is 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?
They 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.
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.
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.
And? They were presumably paying at one point their own developers full time salaries while working on Jest and now Jest has been cast off to somewhere else and suddenly any expected future contributors deserve, in comparison, pennies? All while still using Jest themselves internally.
> any expected future contributors deserve, in comparison, pennies?
No, they don't deserve pennies. Facebook has given its code to the world - if anyone wants to keep that code maintained, then they can do so, but (I'd have thought needless to say) Facebook does not owe them a penny to maintain it just because they were kind enough to donate that version of their code. They can update it if they benefit from doing so.
Seriously, is this where we've got to? You can't open source your code unless you're able to pay for its maintenance in perpetuity? How is this in the spirit of openness? And, more to the point, how in the hell does this (incomprehensibly entitled) attitude encourage open source development?
And good for them, but that doesn't affect the fact that they are doing you (/me, us) a favour, an act of supererogation.
In any case, my point isn't really about whether they are being kind or not. That's a fortiori. It's that they certainly aren't under any obligation to provide it, nor to maintain it on account of having provided it.
(Although to respond to your precise point: I'm severely doubtful of your claim that Facebook gets 'huge marketing PR' from an open source library. No one is signing up to Facebook because of the [apparently-existent] 'huge marketing' of the fact that they wrote React.)
This 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.
It'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.)
This 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.
I 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?
Why 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.
I 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.
