this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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It's a combination of:
Meta's reputation most certainly precedes them here, and they're not a company known for politely co-existing with others but rather for stomping in, and taking what they want and packaging it and selling it.
IMO people have a reasonable basis for reacting strongly (though it's 2023 and the 'hyperbolic over-reaction' is the required thing online it seems).
I don't know why everyone is so upset about the NDA thing... It's such a standard business practice. Whenever I (a mid tier infra engineer at a mid sized software company) needed to talk to a vendor, get a product demo/consultation, get support on a licensed application, etc... We either sent an NDA to that company or bad one on file already with them. Nobody discusses internal processes, policies or roadmaps with an outside contact without an NDA first. It's literally just a standard business practice.
It could be nefarious, since it's meta afterall, but I wouldn't be shocked if there's thousands of people/companies who have standing NDAs with meta just so they could come on campus and demo their product to some team
It's standard, but I can also understand why someone would find it a little concerning. You're grabbing prominent developers and admins and such and they're telling everyone they're going to have a meeting with Meta they can't talk about and, honestly, given how Meta generally behaves, I can understand why the interpretation is 'they're up to some shit we're going to hate'.
I get that, and I agree with it in general, but there's literally no company on earth that would approach open source developers with the intent to pay them to work on a closed source product, or to buy out their open source work without having an NDA in place. Hell, even if Meta just wants to pay them to do open source work to support the community, there will still likely be an NDA covering what they can say to the public about the arrangement or anything they learn from having access to internal systems.
It's like saying "Meta has security guards at the doors to their datacenters! They must be doing something illegal in there!"
Meta is evil and is very likely doing something bad with these developers, but the NDA isn't the smoking gun evidence of evil... It's Meta's history in general
I don't think it's the NDA itself, so much as the tone of the way people framed their announcement of it.
Since I haven't used a Star Wars analogy in a long time, I'll try one:
If your babysitter wrote you and told you that they've got a meeting with the Galactic Empire to take care of younglings on Coruscant, but they can't talk to you about it, you'd probably be a little concerned.
Like you know how that ended LAST time, and don't really have any reason to think that this is somehow different, so you're probably going to freak out about it.
As with most things in life, if you make announcements, make them super vague, and include things like 'I'm going to talk to Zuck about his new project, can't tell you anything' then you're leaving it up to the interpretation of the reader.
And so everyone is going to assume whatever based on their biases, and if there's a group of people who are MORE anti-Facebook biased than Fediverse users, I don't know who that would be.