Comment by burnt-resistor
1 day ago
Lesson: Don't let one megacorp dominate or take over your FOSS project. Push back somewhat and say "no" to too much help from one source.
1 day ago
Lesson: Don't let one megacorp dominate or take over your FOSS project. Push back somewhat and say "no" to too much help from one source.
I think the author was happy to be employed by a megacorp, along with a team to push jemalloc forward.
He and the other previous contributors are free to find new employers to continue such an arrangement, if any are willing to make that investment. Alternatively they could cobble together funding from a variety of smaller vendors. I think the author is happy to move on to other projects, after spending a long time in this problem space.
I don’t think that “don’t let one megacorp hire a team of contributors for your FOSS project” is the lesson here. I’d say it’s a lesson in working upstream - the contributions made during their Facebook / Meta investment are available for the community to build upon. They could’ve just as easily been made in a closed source fork inside Facebook, without violating the terms of the license.
Also Mozilla were unable to switch from their fork to the upstream version, and didn’t easily benefit from the Facebook / Meta investment as a result.
He worked for like a decade at Facebook it looks like. I would guess at least at a Staff level. How many millions of dollars do you think he got from that? It doesnt sound like the worse trade in the world.