I’ve just starting exploring building a Jira addon and came across Atlaskit which on the face of it seems ideal, a ready made set of components matching the Jira look and feel. I started using @atlaskit/dropdown-menu but immediately ran into a bug when running it against React 18 (something to do with ref forwarding not being set up correctly). My first thought was to jump into the code, fix the bug and issue a PR but it seems that Atlaskit is closed source… Judging from this forum there isn’t a lot of resource being made available at Atlassian to support the project so I don’t expect the team to pick up the issue. That being the case it seems to make Atlaskit unusable (my plan is to replicate the components I need as I go now). If there’s limited resource available to maintain it why make it closed source? Why not allow the community to pitch in and keep it in a good state?
You can use AtlasKit / Design System components (yes, there is a difference) if you are willing to stick with React 16 and in some cases even Styled Components 3.2.6. We are using React 16 by default and haven’t had any issue. We’ve made it clear that any vulnerabilities that come out of having React 16 are the responsibility of Atlassian.
If you do need React 18 for some reason, there are Marketplace Partners that tweaked their build long enough to be able to ship both React 16 and React 18, allowing them to use AtlasKit / DC components in combination with 3rd party libraries that depend on React 18.
Now with regard to your question about open sourcing AtlasKit, you can read the response from Atlassian here: Atlassian, stop bullshitting and open source AtlasKit, UI Kit, Forge Runtime, AMPS, Atlas SDK, etc, etc - #2 by tpettersen
Thanks for getting me up to speed with the current status. Hopefully then we’ll see some progress in open sourcing AtlasKit but it sounds like it’s a ways off yet and possibility won’t happen. I’m fairly new to React but my impression so far has been that pinning to React 16 is going to be tricky because the ecosystem moves fast and aligning dependencies to all work with an old version of React is going to be painful. That said AtlastKit does appear to provide many useful components so it’s not so clear which is the path of least resistance.