https://github.com/facebook/react/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Ais...
That's it.
There's no hidden agenda here. We want to fix bugs in React. This is our strategy for a group of fixes. If something in the strategy is poor we'd love to hear feedback. But it's a bit perplexing to me that it's seen as us trying to force people to do more work, _or_ that there's some kind of perverse incentives for that. If I'm communicating this badly let me know here or in private (https://mobile.twitter.com/dan_abramov — my DMs are open) how I could do it better.
If you follow the linked issues, they are things we've been planning to do for years. They're hard to fix in isolation which is why we thought it would help to bring them under a single umbrella. We're not trying to play some kind of trick on you -- if you used React heavily you're likely familiar with all these problems, and they probably bit you at one point or another. We're always trying to improve React, and we finally got to this set of issues.
Attaching events to the root ( https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/2043) is a four-year old issue. We have tried to do this in the past (https://github.com/facebook/react/pull/8117) but the effort fizzled because it's too hard to fix incrementally. But it's an important problem and we regularly bump into the consequences of it.
Syncing the value attribute has caused a security issue that was widely discussed on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16422696) and caused countless linked bugs. So we want to change it back, but it's a major one so we also put it under the umbrella.
Simplifying the event system is something we hear about almost every day -- both from the bundle size perspective, and from the bug reports I linked which have to do with the complexity of our existing polyfills.
Edit: wanted to add one more thought regarding the rephrasing of Joel's article in the grandgrandparent.
I don't think replacing Microsoft with Facebook makes sense in this context. Microsoft was creating a developer ecosystem on purpose. Because they are an application platform. Facebook is not an application platform for React apps. The reason we get paid to work on React is because it's useful _to_ Facebook — not because Facebook wants _you_ to build with it. If engineers and a few managers above the React team didn't care strongly about open source in the beginning, and that in turn didn't attract more people who care about open source to the team, React would stay within Facebook and keep evolving there. So I can see why you want to apply this analogy, and it might even make sense for the educational industry that appeared around React, but it has little to do with Facebook or React itself.
Next: Tempted to say, "don't feed the trolls".
Finally: it seems to me that all too often React the library gets conflated with "React" (+Redux, +[middlewares], +Webpack, +Babel, +Node) the ecosystem.
Therefore it now seems like there _is_ incentive for Facebook to want outside developers to use it.
Thanks.
What I’m trying to say here is not that we don’t value open source contributions. But that much of the driving force behind how React is developed comes from the team itself. Not executives.
