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Comment by qalmakka | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this like telling the world you ate a full meal by eating samples at Costco? Meta is ranking in billions as we speak, they ensure the FOSS projects they rely on are properly funded instead of shovelling cash to bullshit datacentre developments. Otherwise we're basically guaranteed to end up with another XZ fiasco once again when some tired unpaid FOSS maintainer ends up trusting a random Jia Tan in their desperation

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This post is all about how they upstreamed their improvements!

If you get mad when a company makes good use of open source and contributes to a project’s betterment, you do not understand the point of open source, you’re just fumbling for a pitchfork.

I'd say this post reads more like them beating their chest about how great their improvements are.

>Isn't this like telling the world you ate a full meal by eating samples at Costco?

The analogy fails because free samples cost costco (or whatever the vendor is) money. Raking Meta over the coals for using ffmpeg instead of paying for some proprietary makes as much sense as raking every tech company over the coals for using Linux. Or maybe you'd do that too, I can't tell.

Meta is the sole reason PHP is still alive. Also a big reason we're not in MVC hell.

They bet on open source and they open source a lot of technology.

It's one of the best companies when it comes to open source.

I don't know how much total they donate, but I've seen tons of grants given to projects from them.

Yeah we’re in React SPA hell instead. I’d rather be in MVC hell.

That's a common take here but I'd take React any day.

Been doing this for 20 years. React/JSX is the easiest (for me)

Yeah, same. Not sure if everyone is as traumatized as us when it comes to dealing with 100K LOC large Backbone.js codebases though, or before that where we kept state in the DOM itself and tried to wrangle it all with jQuery.

React and JSX really did help a lot compared to how it used to be, which was pretty unmanageable already.

> Yeah we’re in React SPA hell instead. I’d rather be in MVC hell.

I am guessing the world moved to React because the developer community in general does not feel the same way.

No they moved to Reactjs because it was evangelized as the only framework available. There are plenty of people who hate reactjs, don’t worry.

As a react hater, I share DHH's opinion that React was driven by ZIRP. So many giant, slow, react apps out there that are super slow to develop with. IMO HTMX is a 10x dev time reducer over React.

> Meta is the sole reason PHP is still alive.

This could not be more wrong. Meta is still using PHP AFAIK but I'm not sure it's modern. They created the Hack programming language ~10 years ago but it doesn't look like it's been updated in several years. Most of the improvements they touted were included in PHP 7 years ago.

I never said they were still using it (they are in some cases)

But when the backend world was either Java or ASP, FB chose PHP and helped us other small companies out.

They eventually went Hack, the rest went Node for the most part.

But during those PHP years they gave us HHVM and many PHP improvements to get us through.

HHVM was not a contribution to PHP. It resulted in PHP 7 being sped up and releasing with a bunch of long awaited features. But afaik , very little of HHVM made it back to PHP core.

It made PHP 5-7 usable in production, otherwise it would have died before we got to modern PHP.

Of course it wasn't merged in, it was a separate compiler, it certainly inspired future optimizations though.

But the point is, it was a very useful stop-gap solution for the community.

Also would like to highlight that they have contributed a lot to PHP upstream in addition to that.

I think that WordPress is still big enough to keep PHP alive. Furthermore, the sheer number of developer that started coding web apps with PHP in year 2000 plus minus 5 years is large enough to give PHP a critical mass for the next 20 years.

WordPress is keeping PHP alive now

But PHP wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for Meta and it's support.

WordPress is from 2003 and has been very successful since the beginning. FaceBook is from 2004. Both were PHP apps because the late 90s and early 2000s were the years of PHP CMSes and ecommerce platforms. Even if FaceBook did not happen PHP would have been one of the top 5 languages of that age. PHP was popular because of web hostings and the simplicity of apache + mod PHP. It was not big in hype because it was a really bad language until about version 7 and few people would admit to like it.

Actually, FaceBook worked against WordPress and the adoption of PHP because a number of people that could have used a WP instance to blog or to market a product started using a FB page instead. Ecommerce went from self hosted (Magento, Woocommerce, Prestashop) to hosted or to Amazon and also FB.

FB actually made PHP faster (HHVM) and contributed to it upstream with bug fixes (like they are doing with ffmpeg here)

Wordpress did nothing to help further PHP other than adoption (which is still important, but not as important)

Is Automattic contributing back to PHP? I think that WordPress benefits because PHP is available, but does not significantly contribute to PHP development.

>It's one of the best companies when it comes to open source.

If you, for some inexplicable reason, judge companies "the best" only based on their open source software and totally ignore everything else they do to society, while totally ignoring all the other companies who support open source software so much better, without doing all the evil shit that Facebook does (like React).

The rest of us don't bend over backwards so far and blindfold ourselves to harsh reality just to lick Zuckerberg's boots.

I said "one of" when it comes to "open source". Nothing more. (you know the topic at hand)

Not defending the company in any other regard nor do I even like social media platforms, would rather have forums only again as a society.

Feel free to continue to follow me around and perform bad takes, it's funny.

I mean, they contributed their fixes upstream. Thats the most important thing they could do here.

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