Can anyone explain if the patents license is anything more than "if you use our patents, we can use yours", or if that in itself is the thing that is offensive (and why)?
Explaining React's license
371–380 of 622 posts
Re: Explaining React's license
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember sitting in the front row at ngEurope (Angular conf) back in 2014, when Misko announced that Angular 2 would be a (breaking) API rewrite vs Angular 1. At that time, Angular was perhaps at its global maximum of community mind share—bigger than React!—and its popularity began to sink afterwards in large part due to that PR snafu. I wonder if this is React's "Angular 2." What's worse, the misstep this time is…
Coming from the Angular community & still connected quite a bit to it despite currently working primarily with React, I don’t think having an incremental change would have helped Angular compared to React due to the complexity of Angular.js’s API & its flaws. I actually stand by quite strongly behind the decision to rewrite in Angular 2, but Angular 2 took a long time to come into being - it was rewritten 3+ times in…
I agree with you and I think Google is still underestimating the amount of required resources because the framework is still not really "done", a couple examples: universal (SSR) just hit a stable release on angular-cli so it needs time to be widespread and supported in the ecosystem. The are core components like the i18n waiting for a major refactor because they lack basic features: https://github.com/angular/angular/issues/11405
Re: Explaining React's license
#373This is pathetic and breaks my heart. Expecting something good from thieves is not very practical, Facebook the company started by stealing others dream. This days if you take a look at them, they won't let grow any other app for any cost. They bought instagram, whatsapp where they already was providing such feature but due to their earlybird list. Also instead of contributing few tweaks into NPM they made a clone of…
Caffe and Caffe2 is also a good example!
What - Caffe2 is a Facebook project?
I used the original Caffe and thought it was built by Berkely University - Caffe2 only shared the name I guess?
Re: Explaining React's license
#374I love love love love love react as a technology, but this is just awful. I believe any developer not on Facebook's payroll still contributing to React or React native at this point has a moral obligation to stop. I personally feel like such a fool for not taking all this seriously before the ASF gave me a wakeup call. React is a trojan horse into the open source community that Facebook purposely and maliciously stee…
Here's a list of companies using React: - Microsoft - Uber - Yahoo Mail - Dropbox - Airbnb - Netflix - NY Times If they're ok with the license, you probably shouldn't worry too much. Basically, if you don't own any patents or if your company is smaller than any of the above, you should be ok.
You don't know that they weren't granted separate licensing deals.
I assume they were.
This license is likely to protect facebook against patent litigation that a startup might claim facebook is in violation of.
It's not too hard to imagine a scenario where the next snapchat-like-startup is using react native. Facebook is then in a super leveraged position against them legally.
Snap stories are now facebook stories, instagram stories, and whatsapp stories. It's not such a big leap that it'll happen again.
Re: Explaining React's license
#375Earlier 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
And after actually reading it he said it's okay to use for GNU projects: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/directory-discuss/2017-01...
Re: Explaining React's license
#376Earlier 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". 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".
Richard Stallman and the FSF are literally the Inês behind the original de definition of "free software". What are you trying to say there?
Anyway, even if you dont line Mr. Stallman, the set of licenses he deems as free software is pretty much 99.9% compatible with the set of licenses deemed "open source" by the OSI or licenses acceptable by Debian (the other authorities you might Sant to look to when it comes to this)
Re: Explaining React's license
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
yes, weex[1], which is becoming some sort of apache project. it was formerly (?) an alibaba project, not actually sure on the specifics RE: changing of hands. 1. https://weex.apache.org/
I hope they are very good, but it is not a good first impression if your UX framework web page looks like this on mobile: https://kek.gg/i/C92Fk.png https://kek.gg/i/89GHzx.png
And also says "Get Invovled"
Re: Explaining React's license
#378Facebook'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…
The problem is that the descision to use react is not longer a descision for the developers in an organisation. It's now a descision for the legal team. And thats not good.
This is the situation I now find myself in. The next few months will be spent removing react and immutable from the project I'm working on because th legal department say so.
This is quite frankly, bullshit.
Re: Explaining React's license
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I planned to learn more about React, but reading now this convinced me to learn Vue.js instead. It's under MIT license developed by a single person in addition to community's contribution. This link is rather interesting https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/comparison.html#React
Alternatively there's this: https://github.com/developit/preact Preact is a fast 3kB alternative to React, with the same ES2015 API as that of React. Preact is MIT licensed and does not have any additional conditions beyond that.
Yes, preact looks like a good drop-in replacement. The good thing about the MIT license is you know what you are getting.
I also agree with the OP, even viewing FB in the best light possible, about the best case you can make is that they want to hedge any risks to themselves while profiting from OSS contributions and the OSS marketing. As it stands, there is virtually no case to be made for them wanting to contribute to the OSS community. IMHO if you're a dev and contributing to the facebook oss ecosystem, I would actively encourage you to stop.
Re: Explaining React's license
#380I love love love love love react as a technology, but this is just awful. I believe any developer not on Facebook's payroll still contributing to React or React native at this point has a moral obligation to stop. I personally feel like such a fool for not taking all this seriously before the ASF gave me a wakeup call. React is a trojan horse into the open source community that Facebook purposely and maliciously stee…
Here's a list of companies using React: - Microsoft - Uber - Yahoo Mail - Dropbox - Airbnb - Netflix - NY Times If they're ok with the license, you probably shouldn't worry too much. Basically, if you don't own any patents or if your company is smaller than any of the above, you should be ok.
All these companies are big enough to potentially have a separate patent agreement with Facebook. I don't have any insider knowledge about them (or anyone else, for that matter) to say whether they do, but you should entertain the possibility rather than assuming their risks are greater than yours.