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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it kind of sucks to recognize that your job in FOSS is just a token gesture.

Does FB really care about React’s contribution to the community? Or is it just happy to pay a few salaries to look good?

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If you spend time around the FOSS arms of most companies the value they see first is in PR, the second is recruiting, the third is free work. The engineers lead the projects out of passion but what the company sees is opportunity.

Maybe passion, maybe they lead because of financial compensation. Open source or not, I like my jobs to come with a salary attached.

Do you lead an open source project?

I don’t think it’s even a token gesture. Someone (the author) just cared enough to do the paperwork and set up the meetings + it couldn’t be monetized in a meaningful way. Most companies are mundane boring places.

It may be a token gesture to the company itself and at company scale, but still a meaningful act at the scale of the person whose job it is and the community they serve.

If you love making an open source thing, and you love its users, at some level it doesn't really matter why Meta pays your paycheck. They're still paying your paycheck while you get to do something you love.

FB actively uses it, so it's a win win isn't it?

That is a complicated question. They get marketing and a few more eyes delivering bug fixes. However they also get to deal with contributions going not exactly in the direction they want and either have to argue against or take maintenance burden on themselves. Also they limit the changes they can do. An internal framework they can change as they like. They know all users.

For different projects that works differently well.

But this way they get an “internal” framework that they get to exert a lot of influence over, with the added benefit of most of the labor market for those roles already being familiar with it. Building in house tooling adds a lot of cost to onboarding, but this way gets most of those benefits without having to accept that cost.

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