I respect Jamie for the things done and built, but his views tend to be a bit extreme.
I agree that flow is not in a good place right now, but to say that they don't give a shit about the community just isn't true.
Flow has been making significant strides in community outreach, inclusion, and detailing their roadmap lately. And Facebook dropping flow would bring us toward a monoculture which I personally think is a bad thing (it's always good to have some competition to keep new ideas flowing and stuff improving), and Jamie advocating for it seems misguided and shortsighted.
Flow happily accepts contributions from outside people, but because of the somewhat esoteric language choice (ocaml) and the fact that it's significantly smaller in terms of community usage means that there isn't that many people to contribute anyway.
>I respect Jamie for the things done and built, but his views tend to be a bit extreme.
They might be in general, but these sound like some easily objectively checkable claims:
"If you want visible proof of this [Flow not caring for the community], just look through the repo. PRs are never merged. Issues are never addressed. Pretty much all of the activity there is done by a couple people in the community. Critical issues stay open for years. They do all of their development internally"
PRs are never merged because the github repo isn't the source of truth for Flow, their internal systems are. They have this workflow where they will import PRs from github and apply them internally, then close the PR when it's done.
At a glance, it looks like all PRs are just closed, but looking at them individually shows a different story.
It's the same with React-Native, and several other OSS projects by facebook, and Jamie knows that, having worked at FB when that workflow was used.
It has its faults (I personally really hate the workflow they use, but I get why they use it. Github is where the people are, and Phabricator and other internal tools are difficult to integrate into it in a lot of cases, but I still hate it), but to say it's because they don't care about OSS or they do all their work internally isn't true. Plenty of FB employees and outside contributors both make PRs on github, discuss them on github, and just merge them internally closing the PR on github.
Flow has plenty of issues without needing to make them up or exaggerate them. Their errors still take weeks for many to understand and get used to, flowtyped is a mess compared to typescript's type distribution system, their fucking habit of single character type variables makes looking at built in type definitions extremely difficult, the flow binary still is extremely unstable on windows even after years, and the recent move of aliasing Object and Function to `any` seems like a misguided attempt to simplify some code and speed up some checking.
But at no point do I think they should can the whole thing, and I absolutely think they care about open source. Like I said in the comment above, Flow is in a bad place right now, but they are putting their money where their mouth is, the Flow team is reportedly growing at FB, and over the past few months I've seen a massive uptick in the number of releases, blog posts, external contributions, performance, and a significant decrease in the number of bugs I was hitting on a daily basis.
I agree. Flow's communication with the community has been so mediocre that even Dan Abramov resorted to tweeting his frustrations.
At this point, the attempts to pacify Flow users like myself feels an awful lot like when Silverlight developers were begging folks not to abandon ship. People have to defend their livelihood, I guess.
I respect Jamie for the things done and built, but his views tend to be a bit extreme.
I agree that flow is not in a good place right now, but to say that they don't give a shit about the community just isn't true.
Flow has been making significant strides in community outreach, inclusion, and detailing their roadmap lately. And Facebook dropping flow would bring us toward a monoculture which I personally think is a bad thing (it's always good to have some competition to keep new ideas flowing and stuff improving), and Jamie advocating for it seems misguided and shortsighted.
Flow happily accepts contributions from outside people, but because of the somewhat esoteric language choice (ocaml) and the fact that it's significantly smaller in terms of community usage means that there isn't that many people to contribute anyway.