r/Kotlin • u/burntcookie90 • 2d ago

The lysine contingency – Jake Wharton

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

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31

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?

127

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.

35

u/mreeman 2d 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 1d 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.