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Comment by sgt | Hacker News Reader

Key statement: "As Flock ships important bug fixes and features, the Flutter team can then choose to add those to Flutter, on their schedule. "

I see a lot of negative comments but I think this will be a net positive over time to the Flutter community and to the technology itself. I think it will also give Google a reality check on the needs of the community.

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Flutter Founder here. I'm very pro open-source, and pro taking-action, so hopefully good things will come out of it. I think this particular author is mostly stirring up a bunch of noise and does not represent a significant chunk of the community, but we'll see. :shrug:

> ...the Flutter team is in maintenance mode for 3 of its 6 supported platforms. Desktop is quite possibly the greatest untapped value for Flutter, but it's now mostly stagnant.

Can you make any comment on this? Is it accurate?

I can no longer speak for the Google team (since I no longer lead it), but my understanding is that yes, Google is focusing their efforts on other platforms rather than Desktop (despite themselves using Flutter on Desktop for a variety of platforms). Canonical is contributing to the Desktop efforts substantially.

Canonical gave an update on Flutter desktop last weekend at their Ubuntu Summit: https://events.canonical.com/event/51/contributions/533/

It’s a bit unsettling to see Ubuntu demo stuff on Windows (I know that Flutter looks and behaves the same on Linux, but still).

> :shrug:

Is it time for HN to finally support Slack-style emojis?

I'd want them to fix this nonsense first https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

I'm almost positive you, personally, could implement support for those emoji short codes via Violentmonkey

Agree, if it pans out this way in reality of course. That'd be splendid!

NodeJS went through something similar. It was tightly controlled by a single company (Joyent) who were juggling too many balls, and progress went slowly. Community people did a fork (io.js) which shipped improvements faster, but they did so in a careful non-shitty way. This made lots of people switch to io.js, so that eventually NodeJS merged with io.js (iirc they just renamed the latest io.js "NodeJS").

I don't know of any other instances of community forks of company-controlled OSS that did something similar though. If this is just one guy who made a blog post, like a sibling comment suggests it might be, then it might not pan out this way.

> needs of the community

The constant question of big tech OSS is who is it for/why does it exist? Did they make this because they think it's a useful tool internally, or are they trying to build a platform for external developers? If they built it because it's internally useful, then it's probably open-sourced for cultural reasons (the people working on it are used to being in open source communities and want to share what they're working on).

Unless something is specifically being made as a platform for external developers (Android and Firebase come to mind), the level of support you'll get is at the whims of the team's current product leadership and budget. Both of those things change over time - a product manager can always say "let's focus on internal developers" and put the external community in maintenance mode. Based on the article's mention of desktop support being deprioritized, this might have happened on Flutter.

Big tech funds things that would be really hard to pull off with just volunteers, but big tech projects can also be victims to the capriciousness of corporate politics and budgeting.

Wouldn't it be good to launch with at least a few bugs fixes? The launch is a bit thin, just mirroring, nothing to offer?

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