The React Foundation
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The React Foundation is announced with Meta, Vercel, and other companies as founding members, sparking debate about the project's future direction and corporate influence.
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Like, I get that nothing is _owed_ here, but this feels like more of the same tragedy of the commons open source problem we see: tools that millions of apps depend on, barely propped up, and in this case, the child of a megacorporation that could easily create a proper evergreen endowment rather than a milquetoast token contribution to save face.
Or should we just be grateful?
They threw the resources behind RSC to make React, a framework for frontend reactivity, force opt-in for frontend reactivity. Meta is needed more than ever at this point, before React fully becomes a framework for burning compute on Vercel's infra.
I know almost nobody that even uses server side components. It's right out if your backend isn't node..
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/25/tech/chan-zuckerberg-primary-...
is probably worth more in practice. The $3m will basically just cover 'founding the foundation' I guess.
I do wonder whether this is a sign Facebook may no longer develop new stuff in React.
$600,000/year just to run a governance board and organize a conference seems extraordinarily generous to me. In fact I think it's more likely the $3M is more likely to form an endowment for the foundation that will fund it's expenses running forward.
For now. My guess is they will be included in the next round of layoffs. Money for $100 Million pay packages for AI researchers has to come from somewhere!
Somehow because Meta has released a popular OSS library and dedicated over 10 years of engineering resources to it (that has generated immense value for the wider ecosystem), that they should've shelled out more than the $3M they're contributing in order to give its ownership away to a non-profit.
Maybe it's just me but I think they've contributed more than enough. I'm grateful for what they've already contributed and anything else they choose to contribute in future.
But in the context of who that $3million is coming from, how much they have available, how much responsibility they have for the state of it, and how much value it provides to everyone who isn't them, I think it's fair some people might have expected a little more.
If this went the other way where say FaceBook let people freely create accounts and talk to everybody and then later on either charged 10$/month, plastered the site with ads, or started to selling user data people would be upset about a bait and switch.
If you release something for free as you shouldn't be expected compensation for it. People also shouldn't expect anything beyond the terms that you've released it underneath as well.
Pro-tip: LICENSE files are just text! you can edit them. The license is the license, and if someone fucks that up, well, they fucked up. Don't want Amazon to use your lib? Just say that. I have very little pity for those that complain about this sort of thing. "Gratitude" has little legal standing, and expecting a corporation to be ethical is absurd as apologizing to your tapeworm.
If you really want a non-corporate license, there is always Baba Yaga, which no corporation's lawyers will want to touch. https://smallandnearlysilent.com/baba-yaga/LICENSE.txt
Let me try again to explain the view that you 2 are saying you can't see:
I don't have an obligation to donate anything to anyone ever - like you said nobody does.
However, I think people are entitled to hold the expectation and opinion that I'm a bit of a jerk if I'm super rich and choose to donate virtually nothing.
$3million is virtually nothing to a $3 trillion org.
Meta only has 1.8T Market Cap, but that number is meaningless and doesn't represent what they own or can spend, from last report they only have $12B cash on hand and have released over 600 OSS projects [1]. If they donated $3M to each of their OSS projects it would cost them 6.67% of their cash war chest.
But the point is, why should they? What benefit is it to their mission or their shareholders? Why should anyone be entitled to more than the decades of development effort and the $3M they're prepared to donate in order to hand the project to another foundation to take over?
I don't think you should be entitled and expect anything more, and we should all be grateful for what they've already contributed to OSS and what they will contribute in future.
[1] https://opensource.fb.com/projects/
[0] - https://react.dev/community/team
Edit to add a simple example:
Musk's wealth is mostly tied up in Tesla -> You think Musk uses his wealth to wield political power, political power that makes the world a worse place -> You still think Teslas are good cars -> Even though you think that, you don't want to spend your money on buying a Tesla, because this will make Musk more wealthly -> Start at the beginning
Exactly, it is a human behind the company that does every decision. Company is just legal shield. Every decision is affected by what they really are or think.
This is called micromanagement :-)
I am sure there are organizations where the actual work that people do day to day is unaffected by who the people at the top are or what they think on matters other than the business (people at the top are often rather unpleasant anyway). I can't say whether such organizations are common or whether Vercel is one; but I believe I worked at such.
Whenever there is a decisions to be made about increasing profits, for example, someone needs to judge based on moral weight. Outsource to India? Do something gray and think legal matters later? Maybe there is no moral, and the company should operate based on the risk assessment of fines breaking the law and negative PR. In all cases, "what person is", highly influences the outcome of these decisions.
Let me give you a couple of different examples for comparison. Github blocked all users from Iran. Pnpm cut all traffic from Russian ips, whereas Linus Torvalds affirmed the removal of Russian maintainers of the Linux kernel. These are real adversarial actions, the like of which could impact my decisions about a company or a technology, if I were on the receiving end of those. Cowtowing to people in power and taking photos with hateful people is just an undignified behavior that is ultimately just noise.
It's only natural to think that way because these particular decisions are based on ones moral framework. It isn't like choosing a favourite tea. People will be pissed at each other when moral frameworks don't match.
> Cowtowing to people in power and taking photos with hateful people is just repulsive noise.
It comes down to what you said before. People have different views. It's noise to you. It isn't noise to others.
Vercel wants to own React, its been obvious about it for years now.
NextJS is a pile of garbage, and their platform is absurdly expensive and leans heavily on vendor lock in.
- inconsistent behavior between hosted and self hosted versions of the same code
- horrible build times, like laughably bad multi-minute builds for trivial code bases
- crappy directory based routing system with lots of weird gotchas
- schizo identity JAMstack -> serverless -> ssr -> now its microvms + ai
- multiple hilariously long running GH issues where the dev team is thrashing around trying to debug their own black box framework
- "framework" that barely provides any of the primitives necessary to build web apps
- major breaking changes around core features like routing that require painful migrations
- general sloppiness, churn, and insecurity that comes from being part of the nodejs ecosystem
Thats not even getting into all of the shady patterns vercel uses to lock you into their overpriced hosting.
I've been a part of multiple teams that decided to build apps using NextJS, and while the FE is not my responsibility I typically got pulled in to help troubleshoot random issues. It was a complete waste of time in almost every case, and in one case resulted in the entire FE team being let go because they were unable to ship anything on time.
I like the simplicity of Hono and use their html helper to write good old HTML that is send to the client.
"State management" really isn't that much of an issue on the server. Only on clients, when you need to map state changes to DOM updates.
The real issues were the super tight coupling with MongoDB and their decision to roll their own package ecosystem instead of just using npm from day one.
Lots of apps are still stuck in Meteor 2.x hell because of the dependency on Fibers though.
I won't repeat what the sibling poster said, but I can tell you, I've been using NextJS from v12-v15 and in that time we've had:
- The catastrophic (and, at the time, UNDOCUMENTED) "aggressive, opt-out caching of all fetch calls", which confused the living daylights out of everyone who suddenly couldn't retrieve updated data from their servers. Like, don't override a native JS function that's supposed to work in an expected way, with black-box magic that adds caching behaviour that then needs to be overriden _per route_ with directives on each route. Cache headers can be added to fetch calls and are easy to configure globally via axios if needed. If you're going to do black magic, call it "nextfetch" or something
- The app router / page router transition was shockingly badly handled, with so much missing documentation around dynamic routes
- I don't know how many different ways of fetching / setting metadata / <head>-related techniques I've had to learn by now. It seems to change all the time. BUT, that isn't the worst part....the worst part was / is:
- You couldn't, for the longest time, fetch metadata for a page without duplicating fetch requests. I think this is where their fetch-deduping thing came from. But again, black-box magic on a native JS function with very inconsistent behaviour, so for a while, all pages in our app just had to make two fetch calls per page that needed specific metadata added to the <head>
- Vercel as a platform not allowing to set billing limits (have fun with your DDoS that they don't recognise as such)
- Middleware is one file. That's what you get. No chaining, nothing. One god-function for everything. Just think about the anti-pattern that is
- I don't know whether it's clever or terrible, but if you want to add a sitemap, you do so by defining a route by creating a folder called sitemap.xml (yes, a directory), where you then put your route.ts which is in keeping with the way the new router should work. But somehow it just doesn't sit right with me. Folders with file extensions. But it also adds a lot of ability to make the sitemap highly customisable and dynamic, so maybe it's ok
- You suddenly needed to start awaiting url params, cookies, etc. which is sort of fine, but was a huge change causing warnings all over the compiler for months and months
Anyway, those are just a few things off the top off my head. I already find React to be quite counter-intuitive and non-deterministic, but NextJS just adds a layer of pain on top with very, very few advantages.
I am dying to get my hands on an alternative, but also don't want to rebuild all of the apps I built when I was still optimistic about NextJS.
I only vibe code in my Metaverse open office by thinking with my Beta NeuralLink.
I kept wondering if there's something wrong with me or if a framework recommended in so many places can really be this shitty, until I read your comment.
CVE-2025-29927 – Authorization Bypass Vulnerability in Next.js: All You Need to Know
https://jfrog.com/blog/cve-2025-29927-next-js-authorization-...
Whoever implemented that has no idea how middleware is supposed to work.
I hope this isnt the way that React as a whole will go in the end.
But fortunately there are enough alternatives about.
Vercel and Next.js have been the main testing ground during the development of React server components as well.
How much has Vercel contributed to the development of react over the past years?
The last truly useful react feature for me was error boundaries in React 16 (2017?) and I think hooks was react 16 too?
These days if I need ui components for an existing SSR app I just use web components or lightweight libs like mithril.
It also alienated a huge part of the userbase that decided to move away from React.
the official recommendation we got was to just run it on vercel
I would go as far to say that nextjs is not self-hostable in its current state if you expect high traffic and low latency.
It's designed to be deployed on Vercel. Production-ready hosting part of the Framework is not Open Source nor well documented.
https://github.com/vercel/next.js/discussions/59167 https://www.netlify.com/blog/how-we-run-nextjs/
He is a programming prodigy, and that's it. Not a nice person.
Nevertheless, my anecdote should only be taken with a grain of salt... After all, the only person that probably has backups of foropelle is Rauch himself. And who cares what a teenager had to say back in 2006?
1. Vercel / Next are complete technical trash wrapped in egregious vendor lock-in. This directly influences their desire to steer the react foundation in a direction that aligns with their roadmap for Vercel/Next.
2. Their CEO thought it would be a good idea to have a photo op with perhaps the most controversial figure in world politics. This just means he's not nearly as smart as he thinks he is and likely needs a handler.
moreover, this entire initiative looks like a way to reduce vercel's influence, so if you want to be mad, then be mad in 5 yrs, not now.
…people paying for react.
Which is fair, but do we have bend knee and suggest they have the best interests of the react ecosystem at heart? They don’t.
They are invested in: people using next.js and hosting it on vercel.
If that’s not what you’re doing, their interests probably don’t align with yours.
Far too many smart people are putting their energies into such discussions that add a lot of drag to the process of society and humanity moving forward for no net gain at all.
The CEO's politics are just icing on the cake.
Edit: apparently there's some confusion about my comment. I neither use, like, or support Next. I just found it suspicious that a bunch of new accounts showed up making generic comments in support of OP, which to me was a red flag.
I think a somewhat neutral summary (of someone still annoyed by Vercel/Next) would be like this (Notice the distinctions between Site and App, not always clear cut but a dividing line imho):
- React was created by FB to solve real technical issues as their frontend became larger and more complex.
- Site creators liked it as it was one of the solutions of a real issue of reconcilliation of state and view (that often wasn't so bad in the big picture) but React was often a bit heavyweight, App creators really loved it as state reconcilliation took away that entire class of bugs that just became so much worse quickly as Apps grew (and React allowed for more people to create larger apps).
(Angular and Vue has always done this also, they are parallel developments)
- Pressure from those doing sites has always pushed development of React to be "simpler", often good for most parties (even if I think that Redux was mostly thrown overboard prematurely).
- Part of simplifications was bootstrapping, create-react-app became one of the recommended ways to start projects (and was also incorporated into other toolchains such as .NET templates)
- Heavy builds, disabled JavaScript and SEO issues was teetering issues (especially for public site builders), not entirely sure of the inspirations but Next did solve that (perhaps not always entirely elegantly initially)
- React internals start to change to better support these scenarios, nobody really has objections since changes in React has seldomly been for the worse (functional components, hooks, etc). Vercel gains traction as a "do-good" choice.
- After all troubles of OpenSSL, Node finally adopts OpenSSL 3.0 thus breaking create-react-app that had been "deprecated" by the React team (it's easily shimmable but it sent people looking).
- People looking for options find that the only "official" way to use React according to the site is to use Next, so many start adopting it out of fear of being left behind again.
- The Next model however is quite different and tailored to "site" builders and/or people running the full stack in JS
- React however is quite popular outside of the JS only world for enterprise SPA and/or mobile apps where trying to shoehorn in a Next "frontend-backend" becomes overkill and extra complexity. (We used it for one or two projects but have now abandoned it for our regular work).
- The React site is updated slightly, Vite and similar are now mentioned but the perception damage is there and hasn't let go (and last I checked using f.ex. Vite was not "recommended" as being an inferior option to Next for React usage)
- A very popular option for CSS-in-JS (styled) becomes deprecated due to React internals changing for Next and requiring significant rework that the original author had no interest in (no really clear successor with support across the board for Next, SPA and React-Native scenarios hadn't appeared last we checked).
Now this is my perception of events and I'm pretty sure that I'm not alone in this, the Next/React authors felt like it was the way forward due previous feedback for those that hurt (site builders) but probably misjudged or didn't appreciate how much React was used in other workloads(apps) that got disturbed while they were improving their thing.
That Vercel has managed to alienate people in other ways like billing (or politics?) certainly doesn't seem to have helped either.
The React site recommends a full-stack framework for most users getting started, but Next, React Router v7, and (for native apps) Expo are all highlighted options, and two other additional frameworks are also described as up-and-coming options.
The site also describes a from-scratch options for “if your app has constraints not well-served by existing frameworks, you prefer to build your own framework, or you just want to learn the basics of a React app”, with specific instructions for Vite, Parcel, and RsBuild.
There's a legitimate debate to be had, I guess, about the whether the getting started should be optimized toward the lowest-distraction approach to learning basic React or toward what is expected to be the most common production use case, but they seem currently to have decent coverage, concerns about order of presentation aside, of a range of options.
Just that before those specific instructions is again a big "deep dive" box that recommends "consider using a framework".
And yes, I can get the arguments about a easy to get started focus but React is also a more foundational library that has many uses outside of frameworks. Should cppreference.com recommend using QT or MDN and Node.js homepages recommend using Next because "it's easier to get started" ? sure, a tad hyperbolic examples but on the same par.
Seen a lot of people in my professional circles shit on Next/Vercel over beers, but then go to work every day and bang out Next because it's what their manager chose 5 years ago.
Vercel can only ride that wave until the people who hate their product are the decision makers.
I thought I dreamt (nightmared?) this, but it happened? Hoe did they pull it off?
your comment would be a lot more interesting if you attempted to pose a counterpoint besides "BOT!".
They have made egregious mistakes that go far beyond "move fast and break things" and well into "we should have the lawyers join this call".
I've also built commercial apps in other stacks and they also have their warts.
What I've noticed from the other stacks, however, is that the frequency of entirely unnecessary issues is simply lower. React and NextJS aren't going anywhere and one can hope that these things will improve over time.
Ultimately, it's also a great employment guarantee, as companies will need people to maintain the apps that are constantly changing.
I think applying scepticism to Vercel and its motives is healthy, still.
Some other kids (and esp their parents) think this is terrible, that Marky is being cheap and Vicky only wants control of the playground. They don't like Marky and Vicky and try to hurt them every chance they get.
Also, for the new version of the toy you'll have to learn to play a new game as the old way to play with it'll become half-working.
At least that's what parents are afraid of.
I have a Clojure/ClojureScript app using React that I've been maintaining for the last 10 years. I don't use all the features of React, in fact I could probably use a much smaller library — the biggest advantage is that it provides a "re-render the UI based on app state change" model that fits Clojure very well. But I'm very happy that React is there and that it's been maintained with relatively little code rewriting necessary over the years.
Has this ever really been the case in the past 10 years?
It is absolutely true that companies were rushing to rewrite their code every few years when the new shiny JS library or framework came out. I was there for it. There was a quick transition from [nothing / mootools?] to jQuery to Backbone to React, with a short Angular detour about 13 years ago. If you had experience with the "new" framework you could pretty much get a front-end gig anywhere with little friction. I rewrote many codebases across multiple companies to Backbone during that time per the request of engineering management.
Now, is React underappreciated? In the past 10 years or so I've started to see a pattern of lack of appreciation for what it brings to the table and the problems it solved. It is used near universally because it was such a drastic improvement over previous options that it was instantly adopted. But as we know, adoption does not mean appreciation.
> React is used near universally, despite there being alternatives that are better in almost every way.
Good example of under-appreciation.
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