Comment by nevir
8 years ago
Don't forget that there are actual people that come up with, and write the code for projects like React.
They're often solving problems that affect large numbers of developers (initially, inside their company). And, because of the scale of a company like Facebook, they can afford to work full time on these projects.
They then open source them because there's no strategic value to keeping them private, and significant upside to building a community around them (and not undermining that).
I'd argue that some of the best open source projects come from large companies - due to the sheer number of developer hours they can throw at them. Small dev shops can't afford it, there are very few OSS foundations, and there just aren't that many people (relatively) that can devote enough time on the side to compete.
FWIW, Facebook's head of open source, James Pearce, had an excellent interview with Changelog about FB's motivations and challenges for maintaining open source projects: https://changelog.com/podcast/211
According to Pearce, the amount of resources to manage open-source is non-trivial. For now, there's a decision process before deciding whether a project should go open source because of the maintenance cost and because they don't want dead projects under their banner (e.g. codebases that don't get used by the non-FB open-source community). One interesting point Pearce brought up was that React takes community contributions, but FB's policy is to have a single version of React, i.e. the React that's released to the public is exactly what runs on FB production, which requires a certain level of logistics.
The main benefit of OS, besides the free labor from the open source community, is public adoption of the software, which gives FB some kind of leverage in the software world. But it also means that job candidates can come in already experienced in React etc.