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Comment by TheRealDunkirk | Hacker News Reader

So that's the difference, here, that exculpates Facebook? That they don't put their analytics code in PHP or React? Granted, Facebook doesn't put analytics code in those products, but almost every web programmer in the world happily embeds Facebook's JS blob/web bug in almost every single site on the planet to track every single click, by Facebook users or not, which can be tied back to at least a shadow profile in the mothership. That's cool? If so: Got it.

I can see the distinction you're making, but, IMO, it's splitting hairs. Either tracking users activity, by the simple act of their use of your product, is morally acceptable, or it's not. To me, this seems like this exact same thing.

As Scott McNealy said, "You have no privacy. Get over it." I wish that wasn't true, but it would seem that the every government and company is hell bent on making it so.

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Is it splitting hairs to point out that many developers use React who also don't "happily embeds Facebook JS blob/web bug" in their pages? That's the whole point under discussion here, that the spirit and body of open source is that software can be transparently built and maintained for the greater good, and that Kite's quiet, self-serving changes seem to violate what most people consider standard conduct.

How far do you want to take the sins-of-the-creator argument? Does everyone who writes or executes JS become an abettor to Brenden Eich's beliefs on same-sex marriage? How many Internet users are linked to U.S. war actions given DARPA's large role in creating the Internet?

An argument about whether Facebook and Google are evil is out of scope for this thread, but pretty much argued daily in various other daily threads. I think it's possible for people to like corporations and open source, yet find it disturbing when corporations violate community standards of open source.

> How far do you want to take the sins-of-the-creator argument?

Say wha?... I thought I was being clear. Again, Facebook (and Google, et. al.) have built vast empires on mining people's data in the process of them using their software. I'm arguing that, if a person is NOT opposed to this, then they SHOULDN'T be opposed to Kite's or Microsoft's shenanigans with dev tools. Arguing, "if you don't like what Facebook does, don't use it," is exactly analogous to, "if you don't like what Kite did, don't use their plugin."

Either we live in the world where trading our privacy and activity is the cost of using someone else's service or software, or we don't. But, clearly, we do. Arguing against this particular infraction is trying to unring a bell.

"Sins of the creator?..." I swear, sometimes, it's just not worth chewing through the straps in the morning.

OK, it seems like you have a different interpretation of the OP article than I do. You seem to think that people are bothered because a Kite-plugin uses and advertises Kite services. However, that is not the main point of contention. The problem is that a popular plugin that was not previously affiliated with Kite came under Kite's control. Kite analytics/advertisements were then surreptitiously added to the plugins.

When Kite's alteration to the plugins came to light, people took umbrage and stopped using the Kite-controlled version of the plugin. Problem mostly solved, but that doesn't mean people can't continue to criticize Kite for its actions.

If Facebook, which is the official maintainer of React, were to add a line of code that caused all React implementations to add a Facebook button to their webpages, I would bet good money that everyone criticizing Kite here would be ripping on Facebook.

Don't forget that there are actual people that come up with, and write the code for projects like React.

They're often solving problems that affect large numbers of developers (initially, inside their company). And, because of the scale of a company like Facebook, they can afford to work full time on these projects.

They then open source them because there's no strategic value to keeping them private, and significant upside to building a community around them (and not undermining that).

I'd argue that some of the best open source projects come from large companies - due to the sheer number of developer hours they can throw at them. Small dev shops can't afford it, there are very few OSS foundations, and there just aren't that many people (relatively) that can devote enough time on the side to compete.

FWIW, Facebook's head of open source, James Pearce, had an excellent interview with Changelog about FB's motivations and challenges for maintaining open source projects: https://changelog.com/podcast/211

According to Pearce, the amount of resources to manage open-source is non-trivial. For now, there's a decision process before deciding whether a project should go open source because of the maintenance cost and because they don't want dead projects under their banner (e.g. codebases that don't get used by the non-FB open-source community). One interesting point Pearce brought up was that React takes community contributions, but FB's policy is to have a single version of React, i.e. the React that's released to the public is exactly what runs on FB production, which requires a certain level of logistics.

The main benefit of OS, besides the free labor from the open source community, is public adoption of the software, which gives FB some kind of leverage in the software world. But it also means that job candidates can come in already experienced in React etc.

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