Not to dismiss anything you mentioned, but looking at the big picture Facebook also published things that went awry / never really gained adoption. Flow, Buck, Hack to name a few.
I mean, the cool things are cool (even if I have a really hard time with Facebook as a company) but I think it's a bit of a stretch to say Facebook has "the recipe".
FB has thrown a lot of random stuff over the wall that they use internally and thought might be useful to other people. I think Hack and Buck fit into this category. Facebook will maintain them forever, because they are core parts of internal infrastructure. Their value to Facebook is completely independent of wider industry adoption.
Whereas PyTorch is intended, from the ground up, to be a widely useful project, and the dev team weights open-source issues at least as much as internal ones.
(Full disclosure: I used to work at Facebook, including, briefly, on PyTorch)
I actually have been burnt by Flow so I agree with you, I don’t say that they have “the recipe”.
But my subjective point of view is: Google project = “Meh, this big opinionated framework will be probably be abandoned in 2years and all those poor folks who adopted it will have to rewrite everything”, while Facebook project = “Wow they just took the best of the state of the art, and packaged it in a simple reusable library that will be supported decently”.
Not a big fan of Facebook as a company, but as an open source contributor they are among the best in my book.
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Not to dismiss anything you mentioned, but looking at the big picture Facebook also published things that went awry / never really gained adoption. Flow, Buck, Hack to name a few.
I mean, the cool things are cool (even if I have a really hard time with Facebook as a company) but I think it's a bit of a stretch to say Facebook has "the recipe".
FB has thrown a lot of random stuff over the wall that they use internally and thought might be useful to other people. I think Hack and Buck fit into this category. Facebook will maintain them forever, because they are core parts of internal infrastructure. Their value to Facebook is completely independent of wider industry adoption.
Whereas PyTorch is intended, from the ground up, to be a widely useful project, and the dev team weights open-source issues at least as much as internal ones.
(Full disclosure: I used to work at Facebook, including, briefly, on PyTorch)
That's because people at FB have to contribute OSS to help with leveling. Especially after lvl5
This might explain the difference I perceive between FB and Google on OSS. I’ve heard that Google rewards more the creation of new projects.
I actually have been burnt by Flow so I agree with you, I don’t say that they have “the recipe”.
But my subjective point of view is: Google project = “Meh, this big opinionated framework will be probably be abandoned in 2years and all those poor folks who adopted it will have to rewrite everything”, while Facebook project = “Wow they just took the best of the state of the art, and packaged it in a simple reusable library that will be supported decently”.
Not a big fan of Facebook as a company, but as an open source contributor they are among the best in my book.
I would say their track record is still better but it’s hard to compare since some projects are more impactful than others.
Another example is Presto SQL Engine.
FastText, RocksDB...