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Comment by mythz | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the entitlement here?

Somehow because Meta has released a popular OSS library and dedicated over 10 years of engineering resources to it (that has generated immense value for the wider ecosystem), that they should've shelled out more than the $3M they're contributing in order to give its ownership away to a non-profit.

Maybe it's just me but I think they've contributed more than enough. I'm grateful for what they've already contributed and anything else they choose to contribute in future.

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You're right, $3million is a lot for an open source project, with no other context.

But in the context of who that $3million is coming from, how much they have available, how much responsibility they have for the state of it, and how much value it provides to everyone who isn't them, I think it's fair some people might have expected a little more.

But why?

If this went the other way where say FaceBook let people freely create accounts and talk to everybody and then later on either charged 10$/month, plastered the site with ads, or started to selling user data people would be upset about a bait and switch.

If you release something for free as you shouldn't be expected compensation for it. People also shouldn't expect anything beyond the terms that you've released it underneath as well.

Right! As long as the license is obeyed, who are you to complain? If the original developer has a problem with the results of something like the MIT License, well, they chose that, and licensing choices are very extensively documented in news.

Pro-tip: LICENSE files are just text! you can edit them. The license is the license, and if someone fucks that up, well, they fucked up. Don't want Amazon to use your lib? Just say that. I have very little pity for those that complain about this sort of thing. "Gratitude" has little legal standing, and expecting a corporation to be ethical is absurd as apologizing to your tapeworm.

If you really want a non-corporate license, there is always Baba Yaga, which no corporation's lawyers will want to touch. https://smallandnearlysilent.com/baba-yaga/LICENSE.txt

I get your points. Nobody owes anyone anything, life is hard, we should be grateful Meta gifted us React in the first place, licenses are a thing etc.

Let me try again to explain the view that you 2 are saying you can't see:

I don't have an obligation to donate anything to anyone ever - like you said nobody does.

However, I think people are entitled to hold the expectation and opinion that I'm a bit of a jerk if I'm super rich and choose to donate virtually nothing.

$3million is virtually nothing to a $3 trillion org.

> $3million is virtually nothing to a $3 trillion org.

Meta only has 1.8T Market Cap, but that number is meaningless and doesn't represent what they own or can spend, from last report they only have $12B cash on hand and have released over 600 OSS projects [1]. If they donated $3M to each of their OSS projects it would cost them 6.67% of their cash war chest.

But the point is, why should they? What benefit is it to their mission or their shareholders? Why should anyone be entitled to more than the decades of development effort and the $3M they're prepared to donate in order to hand the project to another foundation to take over?

I don't think you should be entitled and expect anything more, and we should all be grateful for what they've already contributed to OSS and what they will contribute in future.

[1] https://opensource.fb.com/projects/

I might have expected $1M/year, not $0.6M/year, just because it sounds cooler, but... OTOH, is there any analogous project that was better supported? Maybe, but I can't think of one...

I think once the React community engine is working you need less budget because of third-party contributions.

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