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Explaining React's license

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Re: Explaining React's license

#341

Post by doctorless »

Lazare wrote: post #337
imtringued wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React is still unsafe because facebook can infringe on your patents and if you sue you will lose your rights to use react.

That's simply false. It cannot happen . How many times does this need to be explained? It's been discussed a ton, the plain language of the license makes that clear, Facebook even covered this in their official React license FAQ ( https://code.facebook.com/pages/850928938376556 ). Please stop spreading FUD.

I think we read a different FAQ, or I'm misreading your link. The FAQ says that if Facebook sues _you_ for patent infringement and you counter sue for patent infringement that they won't revoke your license, but I don't see anything that answers the parent comment's concern.

Re: Explaining React's license

#342

Post by [deleted] »

Lazare wrote: post #337
imtringued wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React is still unsafe because facebook can infringe on your patents and if you sue you will lose your rights to use react.

That's simply false. It cannot happen . How many times does this need to be explained? It's been discussed a ton, the plain language of the license makes that clear, Facebook even covered this in their official React license FAQ ( https://code.facebook.com/pages/850928938376556 ). Please stop spreading FUD.

[deleted]

Re: Explaining React's license

#343

Post by [deleted] »

Lazare wrote: post #337
imtringued wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React is still unsafe because facebook can infringe on your patents and if you sue you will lose your rights to use react.

That's simply false. It cannot happen . How many times does this need to be explained? It's been discussed a ton, the plain language of the license makes that clear, Facebook even covered this in their official React license FAQ ( https://code.facebook.com/pages/850928938376556 ). Please stop spreading FUD.

[deleted]

Re: Explaining React's license

#344

Post by CodeWriter23 »

antoncohen wrote: post #129

Facebook's license is no more dangerous than regular MIT or BSD-style licenses. If you are OK with using MIT or BSD licensed software you should be OK with using Facebook's BSD + Patents software. Here is why: MIT and BSD licenses don't have any patent grants, unlike the Apache 2.0 license. If you use MIT/BSD open source software, and some functionality of that software is patented by the author, you could be sued fo…

> Now if you turn around and use the author for patent infringement for something else, you lose the patent grant that came with the software, and you are back to a normal plain old BSD license.

Um, no. Let's say you own patent A and Facebook has granted you rights to patents B and C. Then let's say Facebook infringes your patent A and you sue them. You lose the license to use patents B and C. That's what the PATENTS file says. Read it. What it doesn't say is because Facebook is publicly traded, it has a fiduciary duty to shareholders to defend all of its intellectual property so if you continue using anything covered by a Facebook PATENTS grant, you better be prepared to be sued for patent infringement. There is no implicit patent grant in the BSD license. Nothing in the BSD license shields the user of BSD-licensed software from patent litigation brought by any party.

Re: Explaining React's license

#345

Post by CodeWriter23 »

losvedir wrote: post #84
carussell wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how Facebook would feel if all the open source software they currently use incorporated the same license That would work incredibly well to neutralize patents, actually, and would be a huge win for free/open source software. It's surprising not to have seen anyone point out the logical conclusion of a world where every major license includes a React-like stance on patents: it's a world where no one is able to bring…

In fact, this is explicitly part of their reasoning, from the blog post linked to in the GitHub comment here: > We believe that if this license were widely adopted, it could actually reduce meritless litigation for all adopters, and we want to work with others to explore this possibility.

And in the case of Facebook, reduce meritable litigation against them.

Re: Explaining React's license

#346

Post by Lazare »

doctorless wrote: post #341
Lazare wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's simply false. It cannot happen . How many times does this need to be explained? It's been discussed a ton, the plain language of the license makes that clear, Facebook even covered this in their official React license FAQ ( https://code.facebook.com/pages/850928938376556 ). Please stop spreading FUD.

I think we read a different FAQ, or I'm misreading your link. The FAQ says that if Facebook sues _you_ for patent infringement and you counter sue for patent infringement that they won't revoke your license, but I don't see anything that answers the parent comment's concern.

> Does termination of the additional patent grant in the Facebook BSD+Patents license cause the copyright license to also terminate?

> No.

In short, if you get into a patent dispute with them, your license to use React does not terminate.

So when someone says "if you sue you will lose your rights to use react" this is wrong. My rights to use React come from the BSD license, not from the patent grant.

Re: Explaining React's license

#347

Post by tomduncalf »

I'm trying to understand what the real world implications of this notorious clause could be - obviously a lot of it comes down to legal interpretation but would be interesting to know people's thoughts.

Say my company patent some key part of a product, and Facebook then release a product which infringes on this patent.

If my company were to sue Facebook for this (unrelated to React) patent infringement, then as I understand it, this patent clause would cease to apply to my company.

Does that then mean that Facebook could countersue my company for using React, saying that some part of React is patented and my use of it is therefore infringing that patent? This seems kind of weird to me, as React is a product that they put out there for people to use - it's like Microsoft suing me because I use Office and they have a patent on the ribbon UI or something.

Or does it just mean that some third party could claim that React infringes on some patent of theirs, and they can then sue my company saying my use of React infringes on their patent? (Whereas previously Facebook would protect my company against this)

Or does it mean something else entirely?!

Re: Explaining React's license

#348

Post by CodeWriter23 »

haeffin wrote: post #102

> I like that we clearly include a patent license in our repo. IMO it would be nice if more companies would choose this route too. I don't get this. The Apache2 license also has a section on patents ...

Yes. And it says you lose the rights Apache granted you if you litigate any of the patents granted by Apache. Facebook's says you lose license to their patents if you litigate or even have shares in a company that litigates against Facebook for ANY patent. It's completely different. And toxic.

Re: Explaining React's license

#349

Post by coldtea »

weinzierl wrote: post #311
carussell wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> such a license would be non-free I'm inclined to say you're mistaken. The FSF hasn't published an analysis of the React terms, but if they did, it seems pretty much assured that they'd deem it a "free software license, but incompatible with the GPL". Recall that Apache 2.0, MPL2, and GPLv3—all free software licenses—have patent termination clauses as well, but they're comparatively weak. In fact, GPLv2 didn't have…

>> such a license would be non-free > I'm inclined to say you're mistaken. The FSF hasn't published an analysis of the React terms, but if they did, it seems pretty much assured that they'd deem it a "free software license, but incompatible with the GPL". Richard Stallman said it is non-free [1]: > React.js is nonfree because of its patent license restriction. [1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/directory-discuss/…

>Richard Stallman said it is non-free

Not the most impartial person to define "free" and "non-free".

Re: Explaining React's license

#350

Post by Mayzie »

EduardoBautista wrote: post #180
drieddust wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed and there is no reason to still stick with react when alternatives like vuejs and angular are available. Its not that great anyways when compared to angular 2/4. There are too many concepts to be mastered and it soon become overwhelming. I tried learning react but dropped it after spending a week when I still could not understand routing. Sense of cohesiveness between different concepts is missing. I believe s…

React Native is what I believe to be the big thing in the React community. I haven't hear of anything similar in the Angular or Vue ecosystems.

As an alternative, albeit in a different language, is Google's Flutter[1]. If Google can correctly capitalise on this moment in the React.js ecosystem, they could really come to dominate in cross platform mobile app development.

[1] https://flutter.io/

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