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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

> In the React Native repo, we sometimes see hot issues with limited activity in response from Facebook. Lack of visibility into such a large company can bring about frustrations when so many people depend on their open source contributions. On the other hand, it forces us to dive into the core codebase in order to figure out the problem, which admittedly one of the best ways to learn an open source platform. By understanding the React Native platform deeply, we were able to maintain a fork that fixes issues for our own use cases and reuse their core modules.

I guess that's one way to sugarcoat the fact that you're at the mercy of Facebook being timely in fixing bugs here…

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They are not at the mercy of Facebook at all. They have access to all of the source, and all the build tools too.

People don't remember what it's like, praying to dear gods that Microsoft patches that IIS bug before you lose your last customers.

They're still at the mercy of Google and Apple on the underlying phone software, given that they can't patch it.

That's the case for any mobile developer.

Praying Unity would fix their crashing bugs in the next weekly patch release so that you don't miss your App Store feature.

That's why it's a good idea to be a few releases behind. Playing with fire otherwise. :)

It is actually quite hard to keep up to date to many open source projects: issues, new features, and the whole are of knowledge it works on... if they really need to take another direction and still want to keep the framework that would become a huge big ball or technical debt which many companies cannot pay or would rather invest on moving to another framework.

This right here. I hope companies stop fearing contributing to React / React Native (and ANY open source project they rely enough on). I think companies that make plenty of revenue off of certain open source projects should invest resources into said projects. If you patched some part of the project, contribute it back! It will only benefit you in the long run instead of running frankenforks of the code, and ultimately if it gets abandoned, offer to continue to maintain it!

I wish more companies would give developers about 10% of their time to develop things they think would benefit the company, whether it's internal tools or open source projects they rely on (or building new things). Just give devs every Friday or every other Friday with free reign to code or learn new things.

Ah well... If the projects they rely on stop being maintained they just suck it up and let it foster eternally till forced to migrate.

Dear Discord:

Your bread and butter seems to rely upon React / React Native. It's an open source project, pay your employees to contribute to it!

Hi! I'm from Discord and we do contribute to React/React Native! I have to say it's quite an adventure to dig through React Native's issue tracker only to find that your CTO's PR has been merged :P

That's good to know, thanks for the context, didn't mean to assume just wasn't sure, been so busy at work today so hadn't read the whole article yet. That does sound pretty awesome! I hope more companies do contributions like you guys do. Facebook kickstarted the project, doesn't mean they will run it forever, eventually the torch must be carried by the community.

No worries! We actually didn't highlight it in the post :P I just find it such a cool fun fact that I wish we talked about it more.

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?

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.

Its free & open-source. You're not at anyone's mercy. You can fix it yourself if you like, pay someone else to fix it, or use a paid solution that pays its devs to maintain it.

Complaining about FB not prioritizing/fixing the particular issues that affect you the most seems a little bit insane to me. Of course they have their own priorities.

To be fair though this exists in Native land too :P but it's sometimes even worse.

EG: In Android in the past there have been bugs in core components like the `RecyclerView` (thing that renders lists) that forced us to downgrade and unlike with React - there is no option there to fork the source and make our own bug fix.

The support library sources have been published to AOSP for a long time now. And as of recently, they're even developing most of them in AOSP (as opposed too merely syncing changes there occasionally):

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/support...

Thats really cool :D I think getting it to the point where it's not just occasionally synced is really helpful for upstreaming contributions and bug fixes.

Maybe a bit pedantic, but, isn't RecyclerView in the support library which is open source? And since the support library is bundled with each app, you actually could fork it and ship a customized version with your app if you wanted.

It's a valid point :) that probably wasn't the best example - although it would likely be quite a journey to somehow ship the forked support library.

Native iOS would have been a better example as that code is not open source at all.

Embarrassingly, I work for a company that has copied several of the recycler view layout managers out and customized them. And that new Work Manager is unusable right now without in house fixes...

I think the point is that they took the time to ensure they're not at the mercy of Facebook.

Regardless, you're really at the mercy of _any_ maintainer of components you depend upon heavily. It's a fact of life unless you feel like building it all from scratch.

Technical debt, much? Talk about jumping on a bandwagon and refusing to admit it was a bad idea from the start.

It's leagues better than what they do with some of the less popular FOSS projects they run, such as HHVM/Hack. What FB have done there has become an existential threat to some tech companies that heavily bought into Hack.

How is it different from any other open source library or framework in that regard?

Facebook can't even fix their own bugs. The UX of their social media platform is far from flawless.

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