RN isn't maintained by Facebook alone. The surface area is vast, and there are many folks externally who help with different pieces that they depend on or care about. There's a few consulting companies that help maintain RN, and they need to earn money in order to be able to contribute to open source instead of working on their client's projects.
I think this very problem is what makes a lot of people cynical about open source software. HN sees frequent "If you want to see development on [open source project X] continue, money puts fingers to keys" cries for help—from the FSF to Mozilla to Apache. And yet, when one of the most valuable companies in the world writes a blog post about their open source software, leading with:
> At Facebook, we're using React Native more than ever and for many important projects. One of our most popular products is Marketplace, one of the top-level tabs in our app which is used by 800 million people each month.
has a project that's short on cash, how much money does it really take to make this stuff happen? When a company with tens of thousands of employees and billions in revenue and a billion users can't manage to address the very real and critical problems that their insanely popular framework has, what is a tiny project like PyPy supposed to do? What are the folks that make react-router supposed to do? What about the people that contribute to vim/iTerm2/VLC?
Certainly, the world keeps turning and open software keeps getting written and improving. But if you're embedded in open source and you see this kind of nonsense, it's hard not to feel a twinge of cynicism that even a deep-pocketed sponsor can't manage to help a project be exceptional.
Facebook invest in the part of ReactNative that they care. Other companies can invest in the other parts that they care.
Isn't that the point of Open source? Project gets better by everyone scratching their own itches, which collectively means everywhere got scratched.
How would RN being closed-sourced better in this case? Facebook will still fix RN in the part that they care, the different is you don't even get to use that.
RN isn't maintained by Facebook alone. The surface area is vast, and there are many folks externally who help with different pieces that they depend on or care about. There's a few consulting companies that help maintain RN, and they need to earn money in order to be able to contribute to open source instead of working on their client's projects.