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Comment by edgyquant | Hacker News Reader

Facebook created jest dude, they’ve invested more than that 26,000. That’s also almost half of the total donations.

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?

We don't really need the funds and can't spent the ones we have, so we haven't pushed for more donations over the years.

Facebook built this, with engineers that they were paying a salary to. It’s 100% industry-funded.

I think they meant 'the rest of the industry'?

Exactly

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.

Sorry for the confusion.

You're vastly ignoring the fact that Meta paid full time salaries for developers who worked exclusively on it for years.

Overall their financial contributions could be in the millions. Don't think about the small amount they've done recently.

I was referring to the industry as a whole. Meta seems to be an outlier.

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