alt Hacker News> As our internal fork became increasingly outdated, we collaborated with FFmpeg developers, FFlabs, and VideoLAN to develop features in FFmpeg that allowed us to fully deprecate our internal fork and rely exclusively on the upstream version for our use cases.
Some comments seem to glance over the fact that they did give back and they are not the only ones benefitting from this. Could they give more? Sure, but this is exactly one of the benefits of open source where everyone benefits from changes that were upstreamed or financially supported by an entity instead of re-implementing it internally.
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It's a positive development, but we can't minimize or ignore the conditions that precipitated it, giving back was less than hanging onto the changes for private benefit.
Still, Meta has also put a lot out there in open source, from a differentiation perspective it doesn't seem to go unnoticed.
A gentle reminder that all the big techs companies would not exist without open source projects
Yes, they contributed to open source - this is a good thing.
But personally, I took issue with the tone of the blog post, characterised by this opening framing:
>For many years we had to rely on our own internally developed fork of FFmpeg to provide features that have only recently been added to FFmpeg
Could they not have upstreamed those features in the first place? They didn't integrate with upstream and now they're trying to spin this whole thing as a positive? It doesn't seem to acknowledge that they could've done better (e.g. the mantra of 'upstream early; upstream often').
The attempt to spin it ("bringing benefits to Meta, the wider industry, and people who use our products") just felt tone-deaf. The people reading this post are engineers - I don't like it when marketing fluff gets shoe-horned into a technical blog post, especially when it's trying to put lipstick on a story that is a mix of good and not so good things.
So yeah, you're right, they've contributed to OSS, which is good. But the communication of that contribution could have been different.
One thing people can't fault Meta for is that they contribute back to the community at large.
We're using React Native, hello!?
We're using React!
Tons of projects, we should be very grateful they give so much tbh.