31–40 of 622 posts
I also wonder if this will hold up in court, or is purely a defensive measure.
This is in reply to the Apache Software Foundation decision to list the BSD + Patents license as a Category-X license. - Facebook gets attacked by meritless patent litigation - Facebook creates the BSD + Patents license, which has the following effect : > The patent grant says that if you're going to use the software we've released under it, you lose the patent license from us if you sue us for patent infringement. -…
> without first re-writing the entire front-end to not use React Do note this isn't necessarily the case, because nobody has yet found a patent that covers React.
> We've been looking for ways around this and have reached out to ASF to see if we could try to work with them, but have come up empty. This, to me, is a significant warning sign. I was leery of the React license to begin with. But the community at large had _almost_ convinced me that it was nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, Facebook's position as stated here is clearly that the license is weaponized for a reaso…
"Replace React with Mithril for licensing reasons" https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/issues/650
Personally, I increasingly doubt that BSD+PATENTS is even GPL-compatible -- and so potentially Automattic may be violating the GPL by using React integrated with WordPress.
What's especially sad about this is that React isn't even that good compared to other vdoms like Mithril and Inferno and others. React just has a lot of name recognition and mindshare from the Facebook association (which then translates into a rich-get-richer effect with more tutorials and components).
Here is a list of more than twenty alternative vdoms I put together in January 2016 (although Mithril remains my favorite): https://github.com/dojo/meta/issues/11#issuecomment-17679024...
There's a pretty obvious solution to this: relicense React. The fact that Facebook isn't even considering that is a pretty strong indication that they "weaponized" their license on purpose.
> To this point, though, we haven't done a good job of explaining the reasons behind our BSD + Patents license.
I think we already understand the reasoning behind it.
> As our business has become successful, we've become a larger target for meritless patent litigation.
And the solution you chose stops merit-ful litigation as well.
> We respect third party IP, including patents, and expect others to respect our IP too.
Clearly you don't, because you've intentionally designed a license to allow you carte blanche to violate other companies' patents if they're dependent enough upon React to not be able to easily stop using it.
Will note though that if Facebook does choose to revoke a license on the basis of getting sued for something unrelated it will definitely reflect poorly on FB in the developer community and reduce React's adoption.
ELI5 anyone? My basic understanding is if you use React and decide to sue FB for patent infringement down the line, FB can countersue(?) bc they revoke your grant to use the patent upon you suing them. But what _exactly_ constitutes using React? Of course using the library is one thing, but what about using some other library that installs React as some dependency? Does using JSX also count as using "React"? I just f…
- They confirm Apache's legal reading of the BSD + Patents.
- They deny the part about Facebook being able to steal your IP because Facebook isn't like that.
- They refuse to codify changes to enforce Facebook isn't like that
- We therefore must assume Facebook is like that.
Isn't the style of programming react imposes (unidirectional data flow and component composition) the real innovation for front end applications here? Sure the dom diffing technology was hot at the time it came out but it's basically is a commodity item at this point. In that sense, the open source community can (and should) build multiple react clones that are licensed more liberally. Sure, I'm annoyed by the licens…
[1] https://github.com/developit/preact/blob/master/LICENSE
[2] https://github.com/infernojs/inferno/blob/master/LICENSE.md