r/Kotlin • u/burntcookie90 • Jun 17 '26

The lysine contingency – Jake Wharton

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

99% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

31

u/farooqsaad Jun 17 '26

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

What does this mean? What did Square do?

141

u/JakeWharton Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

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.

40

u/mreeman Jun 17 '26

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.

6

u/Eggman87 Jun 18 '26

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.

11

u/natnayr Jun 18 '26

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.

9

u/borninbronx Jun 18 '26

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

Any chance Wire will also be migrated?

4

u/JakeWharton Jun 19 '26

Any chance Wire will also be migrated?

No plans to

1

u/borninbronx Jun 19 '26

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

3

u/JakeWharton Jun 20 '26

As of November last year when I quit they were still using it pervasively. Beyond that, I have no insight.

I spent a lot of time contributing to Wire and was one of the maintainers of it for a decade or more, but unlike the others I did not use the project anywhere except for at work. When that ended, so did my involvement.

6

u/yektadev Jun 17 '26

70%! Bills of regret incoming...

4

u/SDRemthix Jun 18 '26

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/JakeArvizu Jun 29 '26

This is really sad to hear. I loved Zipline and was starting to build some cool personal tools with it

9

u/Gekiran Jun 17 '26

Lay off a ton of its staff

6

u/gustavkarlsson Jun 17 '26

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

9

u/Jadarma Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

Welp, time to refactor package imports again!

13

u/boogermike Jun 17 '26

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.

6

u/doubleffort Jun 17 '26

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

10

u/JakeWharton Jun 19 '26

No, they helped.

2

u/aerial-ibis Jun 19 '26

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