The thing that makes ist questionable is the dishonesty. It's not like Meta has been building their empire on open ecosystems. If this was something that was dear to them on principle, there are plenty of things that they could have done differently with FB, Insta or WA (to this day).

So why the change of heart? Well, it's not. They are simply not able to compete anywhere on the Pareto frontier. So they give their relatively bad stuff away and play the high and mighty game, because that's all they can do to get returns.

Not a great look – and I would expect that to last about as long as they can't actually monetize their stuff more effectively.

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jayd16 an hour ago | parent [-]

> It's not like Meta has been building their empire on open ecosystems.

Is this actually true? They have their closed social graph or whatever but come to think of it they're built on a lot of open tech, the web, Android, etc. Maybe they don't contribute back to a lot of these things?

I'm fully ready to believe it but it would be interesting to dive into this conjecture.

	▲	txru an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I first think of React's re-licensing from Apache, where under the new license if you sued Facebook for patent infringement for any reason, you would lose the patent grant to use React. React was already quite prominent in web technologies, but that license pointed a loaded gun at any business smaller than Facebook who wanted to use React. They opened it up to its current license, MIT, as the backlash built.