> we'd only read it in academic papers, like Google has done with its core technologies

Nit: Google has been pretty generous in supporting developers outside the company. Eg., see Golang, Kubernetes, JS closure library, protofubf, bazel, and many more at github.com/google.

Not to mention being a top contributor to the Linux kernel, clang/llvm, mysql, doing almost everyone's security research for them (including, notoriously, finding most of the issues that get released in Apple security patches), etc. Facebook sure does a better job of evangelizing their own open source stuff, but I'm not sure that means they're actually contributing more. Even some of Facebook's "contributions" are ripped off from Google, like buck.

Buck was not "ripped off" from Google any more than Hadoop was "ripped off" from Google.

Buck is a nearly verbatim clone of the build system used inside Google, except that the word "blaze" has been replaced by the word "buck", and it was written by xooglers at facebook.

Netflix has a pretty awesome open source library, they are worth checking out as well. https://netflix.github.io/

It's funny you should mention Netflix. They demoed something called Falkor two years ago that is/was extremely similar to Relay/GraphQL. It's unfortunate that it's made so little progress in the past two years, but it wouldn't surprise me of the talks on Falkor had influenced or inspired Facebook's implementation.

For those that want links:

https://twitter.com/falcorjs

http://moduscreate.com/falcor-mvc-for-an-asynchronous-world

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8UgDZ4rXBU

I remember from a David Nolen talk that Relay/GraphQL and Falkor were actually developed in complete isolation from each other, believe it or not.

The fact that these two companies came up with the same idea independently just reinforces how truly beneficial it must be.

I can't wait to try Om Next's implementation of this concept in my apps!

fwiw Jafar announced last week it would be open sourced in the next couple of weeks [1], and a number of people have access already and are helping with documentation and the like.

Falcor and Relay are conceptually similar but Relay is much more of a query engine, and Falcor isn't so much.

[1] https://plus.google.com/events/ca3l6qalpu0uqcce58a379006m0

> two years ago

AFAIK Falcor was announced just six months ago in spring 2015; I assume it is making progress towards a release. Relay wasn't based on it.

You're mistaken. My first exposure to it was a talk at QCon in Nov 2013. It wasn't posted publicly online until Feb 2014, but here's the link: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/netflix-reactive-rest

Edit: I meant to write "...stay light years ahead."