React’s next act: the React Foundation
Plus: Supabase slurps up another $100M and Qualcomm acquires open source electronics firm
Hi folks,
The big story this week is Meta handing over React to the Linux Foundation, marking a shift from company-led stewardship to community governance under a new React Foundation.
Elsewhere, Supabase secured $100 million in Series E funding to push its Postgres platform deeper into data-intensive enterprise territory, while Qualcomm made a rare move into open hardware, acquiring a company rooted in the maker community and low-cost prototyping.
Plus more…
As usual, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, tips, or suggestions: forkable[at]pm.me.
Paul
Open issue
Meta migrates React to the Linux Foundation
Meta is handing over stewardship of React — the open source, frontend JavaScript library used by millions of developers — to the Linux Foundation, which will host it under a newly formed entity called (drum roll…) the React Foundation. The new nonprofit entity will oversee governance, core infrastructure, and community programs, with Seth Webster, Head of React at Meta, serving as its executive director.
Even though React has been an open source project since 2013, the transition formalizes its status as community-driven infrastructure rather than one under the auspices of a single corporation.
“React has outgrown the confines of any one company,” the React project maintainers wrote in a blog post. “We open sourced React over a decade ago to help developers build great user experiences. From its earliest days, React has received substantial contributions from contributors outside of Meta. Over time, the number of contributors and the scope of their contributions has grown significantly. What started out as a tool developed for Meta has expanded into a project that spans multiple companies with regular contributions from across the ecosystem.”
Meta will continue to play a role through the new foundation’s board, alongside founding members which includes a handful of names you’ve probably heard of — Amazon, Microsoft, and Vercel, among others.
The React Foundation is expected to be formally constituted in the coming months, with an open membership model and a focus on interoperability across React Native, React DOM, and related tools.
“The move to a neutral home is the natural next step in the evolution of this important open source technology to ensure React and React Native remain open, innovative and community led,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation.
Read more: Linux Foundation / React blog
Patch notes
Supabase raises $100M at $5B valuation
Supabase, the open source backend-as-a-service platform often compared to Google’s Firebase, has raised $100 million in a Series E round of funding co-led by Accel and Peak XV, at a valuation of $5 billion.
The announcement comes just six months after Supabase announced a $200 million raise at $2 billion valuation.
The new capital will accelerate Supabase’s work on Multigres, an enterprise-scale edition of its Postgres platform designed for large, data-intensive applications.
Read more: Supabase blog
Qualcomm connects with the maker crowd
Qualcomm has announced plans to acquire Arduino, the open-source hardware and software platform popular among developers, educators, and makers worldwide. The move extends Qualcomm’s reach into the open-hardware ecosystem and community-driven prototyping space.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Read more: Qualcomm press release
Codes of conflict
Programmer and open source advocate Eric S. Raymond sparked debate after criticizing modern codes of conduct in open source projects, arguing that they are a “kind of infectious social insanity producing lots of drama and politics and backbiting, and negative useful work.”
He wrote:
“If you’re stuck with having one [code of conduct] for bureaucratic reasons, replace it with the following sentence or some close equivalent: ‘If you are more annoying to work with than your contributions justify, you’ll be ejected’.”
Sounds great in theory, but as the folks at It’s Foss noted, some form of “organized way to handle things” is needed, otherwise “the whole open source ecosystem would descend into chaos.”
Read more: It’s Foss
Apache Foundation declares new top-level projects
The Apache Software Foundation has announced that Apache DevLake (an open source data analytics platform) and Apache Grails (a web application framework for the JVM) are being promoted to top-level status, recognizing them for maturity and community stability. The change signals that those projects have moved beyond incubation to full governance status within the Foundation.
Read more: Apache Foundation
Meta helps devs decompress with OpenZL
Meta launched OpenZL, a new open source, format-aware compression framework engineered to offer high compression for structured data while maintaining performance.
Read more: Meta blog
Percona picks up Peter Farkas
Percona, the open source database company, has appointed Peter Farkas as its new CEO. Farkas worked at Percona from 2011-2016, and most recently he was CEO of FerretDB, an open source MongoDB-compatible database
Read more: Peter Farkas on LinkedIn
And finally…
LibrePhone rings in a new kind of freedom
The Free Software Foundation marked its 40th birthday with two surprises: a new president, and a new project called LibrePhone. Announced by FSF executive director Zoë Kooyman, the initiative is a partnership with long-time GNU developer Rob Savoye, aiming to bring “full computing freedom” to mobile devices.
“Since mobile phone computing is now so ubiquitous, we’re very excited about LibrePhone and think it has the potential to bring software freedom to many more users all over the world,” Savoye is quoted as saying.
As Brad Linder at Lilyputing hypothesised, unlike existing “de-Googled” Android variants or Linux-based phones that still depend on proprietary drivers, it appears that LibrePhone’s goal could be to strip those away entirely — creating a smartphone that runs only free software, top to bottom.
We won’t know for some time what the LibrePhone will look like. Whether the project can deliver a new-level of smartphone purity is anyone’s guess (the FSF tried something similar in 2017), but it’s a fittingly ambitious way for the organization to celebrate forty years of insisting that freedom means every line of code.
Read more: Free Software Foundation