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Interview With Facebook's Head of Open Source
Czech37 writes Facebook may be among the world's most well-known tech companies, but it's not renowned for being at the forefront of open source. In reality, they have over 200 open source projects on GitHub and they've recently partnered with Google, Dropbox, and Twitter (among others) to create the TODO group, an organization committed to furthering the open source cause. In an interview with Opensource.com, Facebook's James Pearce talks about the progress the company has made in rebooting their open source approach and what's on the horizon for the social media network.
In some ways, it's worse than just a PR stunt, because patents effectively neutralize many of the benefits of open source - this effectively allows these companies like Google andF B to recruit developers to fix their bugs for free, while they make billions from the improved software - because they know the fact that it's open source doesn't matter when the big software 'parent cartels' own all the patents and cross-license, ring-fence and regulate to keep real competition out the market anyway. The serfs work for free while the lords live the high life.
Abolishing software patents would do more to benefit the software industry (and everyone on earth) than making every last piece of code open source.
My other UID is three digits.
While I would agree with the OP that a lot of these projects target the needs of large, FB-like companies, Reactjs and Flux (Flux is a pseudo-framework for React) are really nice alternatives to heavier options like Angular and Backbone. If you're building with JS on the front end then definitely take a look; the speed advantage over Angular is ridiculous.