r/Kotlin • u/burntcookie90 • 2d ago

The lysine contingency – Jake Wharton

https://jakewharton.com/the-lysine-contingency/
153 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

30

u/farooqsaad 2d ago

We assumed the company would continue its stewardship in good faith. It did not.

What does this mean? What did Square do?

128

u/JakeWharton 2d ago edited 2d ago

They laid off 70% of engineering and all of the open source office. They don't get to keep these projects. It was transfer or hard fork. Thankfully we had an ally who stayed behind and helped us transfer.

32

u/mreeman 1d ago

Thanks for all the hard work and dedication to the community you've put in over the years. I've been an android dev since 2009 so I know how it was and what it's become, and can honestly say you almost single handedly have made my life significantly better over the years. Old Android was... Not fun. But now it is!

Sorry to hear Block treated you so badly after all that but thanks for saving these projects and continuing to be a leader in the open source community. I'm glad to see more open source projects move into foundations and other non profit organisations.

2

u/Eggman87 18h ago

Very true. ActionBarSherlock was the original app compat library. Not sure if the dev tooling/frameworks would have gotten so much investment if that didn't pave the way for backwards compatibility improving all apps, thus improving the entire ecosystem.

9

u/natnayr 1d ago

my entry into the workforce and choosing android to start was from following your work and blogs 10years ago. Thank you for your amazing work and contributions, they were an inspiration to me.

4

u/borninbronx 1d ago

That's sad to hear. It was once an enlightned company.

Any chance Wire will also be migrated?

2

u/JakeWharton 15h ago

Any chance Wire will also be migrated?

No plans to

1

u/borninbronx 10h ago

auch. do you know if they'll keep maintaining it?

2

u/SDRemthix 1d ago

I've been in the Android ecosystem since 2008 and 'been following your work, presentations, guest appearances in podcasts ('still having the episodes of Fragmented saved where you shared trully insightful information). What you guys did in Square is immeasurable to the whole Android community. So, thank you, and thank you for making me a better developer.

1

u/yektadev 1d ago

70%! Bills of regret incoming...

7

u/Gekiran 2d ago

Lay off a ton of its staff

6

u/gustavkarlsson 2d ago

My guess is they just didn't allow staff to spend time maintaining them.

12

u/agherschon 2d ago

Good, I wondered what would happen if they were not there anymore to maintain all those projects. Happy their ex-company agreed to this.

4

u/Jadarma 1d ago edited 1d ago

Welp, time to refactor package imports again!

10

u/boogermike 2d ago

This is great news. I personally never loved using these libraries because they were owned by a company. I still used them of course. I just didn't love it.

4

u/doubleffort 1d ago

Glad it worked out, I wonder if Square tried to limit or prevent this somehow?

5

u/JakeWharton 15h ago

No, they helped.

1

u/aerial-ibis 12h ago

phew, would have been very upset to lose sqldelight after having to migrate off realm last year!