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Comment by nikanj | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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. :)

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