As far as I can tell, most of zstd's development is still by Facebook employees, though not all of it. I tend to think zstd has enough traction that development would continue even if FB were to abandon the project.
I believe Yann Collet, author of lz4, eventually went on to work for Facebook and finished it there.
Whatever is cool at Google IO XYWX is already abandoned by the time we reach into Google IO XYWX + 1.
This is my naive understanding. A for profit company open sources a project that they have been using and developing internally. The have built a philosophy and understanding of the project as they use and develop it. Most of their action regarding the project is that they must use it and they usually don't have any other options.
Because the foundation is already laid the solution for its shortcoming is having just an understanding of them. Then you open source the project knowing that you have developed the project to it's completion.
Now comes the OSS community. Either we request features that goes against the project philosophy or we don't want to get involved because we don't need to compromise and acknowledge the shortcomings because we have options.
A good solution can be open sourcing projects that the org thinks isn't complete and needs further development without compromising security, philosophy and usability. Because if you have a list of things you need, you can ask the OSS community to fix those things rather then be critical of the foundation and philosophy.
Idea for projects not owned by mega-corps (half real, half fantasy):
1. Get the project added as a package to one or more major commercial Linux distros, e.g., RedHat, etc.
2. Grant commit access to one or more devs at the same Linux vendor. Allow them to do whatever they want. You might not like their direction, but it should survive.
3. Retire from the project whenever you like.
4. Also, you could post a note in README about retiring. If people want to add features, ask them to fork, or just grant them commit access and let them go wild.
If it comes to stuff I actually want to _use_, I avoid projects backed by a single or a few companies - like Sapling. So from that angle, I'm not particularly impressed either.
Better than Microsoft? I don't think I've ever been able to talk to a human at Google, whereas with Microsoft, I get feedback very quickly on issues and pull requests. Does Google even interact with people with open source? For example, I am using Skia via SkiaSharp, and the only place I know of to go for Skia help and issues is their Google Groups page, a website out of the 2000s. And very few seem to actually monitor the group. I'm not even really sure what Google does in open source. Even the things that are released to the public, like Skia, are well known to come with a huge amount of internal baggage.
Whereas Microsoft has dozens of active projects on GitHub where you can talk directly with the people working on it at Microsoft.
> I'm not even really sure what Google does in open source.
Kubernetes (and a bunch of the offshoots), golang, a bunch of ML things, etc. It's just that many have independent foundations (CNCF) running them now to keep project management independent from a single company.
...and yes, I realize it's weird to say this considering Google is known for abandoning things. Maybe it's just coincidence that I've run into more abandonware from FB than Google?