Your thought process is completely fair, but just to clarify: Phabricator was never open-sourced by Facebook. The main engineer behind Phabricator (Evan Priestley) left Facebook to create Phacility and open-source Phabricator; that was never a Facebook product.
If memory serves, Evan open sourced Phabricator at Facebook back in 2010 or 2011, then quit to work on it full time.
Shortly after (months, years?) the internal version of Phabricator diverged from the now not FB managed or stewarded OSS one.
However I think it is fair to say, assuming my memory is correct, that Phabricator was open sourced by Facebook at a very different time, before the company really committed to supporting open source projects. At that time it was more ‘if an individual engineer wanted to then go for it’ rather than there being any formal process or consideration of longer term commitments.
That changed fairly shortly afterwards with the creation of the OSS team.
I remember someone transitioning to the newly formed team and moving from Dublin to London to do so in ~2012, as we became housemates :)
> left Facebook in April [2011], and shortly after, we open sourced Phabricator
Although if Evan had access to the codebase after he was an employee and if it was the Facebook codebase that was open sourced then Facebook were involved. The original post sounded (to me) like the OSS code wasn’t the same as the FB code.
I think that just backs up my point that it was the Wild West back then in terms of individual decision making.
React[0]: JavaScript front-end web framework from Facebook. For good or ill, the most widely-used web framework in the world.
Not to say that Facebook will maintain Sapling, but React does stand as proof that they're not incapable of carrying an open source project to the finish line.
Overall, I'm glad they do these things, though since it is better to have this code accessible than absent. Good on them!
I have a hard time understanding the benefit of using a language that’s almost like a very popular one, but not quite.
But the implementation has a lot of drawbacks - the language is painful, typing is bolted-on and still incomplete after years of work (eg there are no typed arrays), the standard library is an inconsistent mess thanks to its origins of “take several other language’s standard libraries and duct-tape them together”, etc.
[0]: https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
Flow[1]: JavaScript typing system from Facebook. My company uses it, open development has since been halted by Facebook so we're effectively on abandonware.
For all I know Sapling is fantastic and will be developed for years to come. But personally I can't help but feel "once burnt, twice shy" (or in this case, twice burnt once shy). I'd be happy to be wrong here because ergonomics of Git are really frustrating in many places.
0: https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/ 1: https://flow.org/