It's not at all different from loving music written by drug addicts whom you wouldn't want as friends. Software developers are people too.

Those drug addict musicians that track your every move online, sell your data, make billions from advertising, influence elections. Totally "not at all different".

Good point. Also, almost 100% of the time, the actual musicians get peanuts. Taylor Swifts are 1/10^8.

Out of all the music I listen to on purpose, maybe 20% is popular. I doubt the artists behind the other songs I listen to are multi-millionaires.

I like the analogy. Sorta offtopic, but I was thinking about how morally falsy it is to buy albums of those artists, because well, most likely a big part of the revenue will be spent on drugs and on continuing that lifestyle.

Just because you don't like something doesn't mean you think it is immoral.

For example, many people against Facebook simply want to be in better control of their online identities, and have privacy. I am in this boat. I don't think Facebook is 'evil', or sharing my data with 3rd parties is a 'sin'; I just think society would be better off if privacy of this kind were more strongly controlled by individual choice, rather than the whim of a corporation.

Programmers should consider the implications of their actions. Using Facebook's libraries support Facebook. If you don't want to support Facebook, you should prefer alternatives to their libraries whenever possible.

- React -> Vue, Mithril, etc.

- React Native -> Weex, NativeScript

- Reason -> Elm, Purescript, Scala.js, Typescript

- etc.

How exactly using a library supports them?

They benefit from other developers using it or they wouldn’t go through the trouble of making it accessible outside of the company.

Access to good talent runs try. Maybe you grow a team of highly talented developers using Facebook’s stack. Facebook is more capable of recruiting them since they’re already familiar with some of Facebook’s stack.

Yes, but the benefit is not from people just using the library.

There are interesting reasons why companies expend a lot of resources on free stuff for programmers. If it didn't have a beneficial effect, they wouldn't do it.

Yes, but the benefit is not from people just using the library.

What do you mean?

agreed - that sentiment carries to all of us software-engineers working in the Silicon Valley Peninsula.

Are you sure this move isn't just a business practice we're all too stupid to realize we should be against? I'm not. I'm not touching it. Maybe if it goes GPL.

Community: All this FUD about your library licensing scares me.

FB: OK, we'll remove the part all the FUD is about.

This guy: Here's some entirely baseless FUD to replace the FUD you removed.