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Explaining React's license

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Re: Explaining React's license

#481

Post by captainmuon »

I would appreciate if Facebook would actually explain their license.

Especially: Is BSD+Patent strictly more permissive than BSD or not? There are two major camps as far as I can see:

Camp 1: BSD license does not give you a patent grant. You can always be sued by Facebook if you infringe (potential) React patents. On top of this, Facebook grants you use of (potential) React patents - but only as long as you don't enforce patents against them. If you do, you are back to the BSD license alone.

Camp 2: This camp believes a) that the BSD license implies an unconditional patent grant (for React) and b) that the conditional patent grant ('PATENTS') is not optional, but inseparable from 'LICENSE'. If this is true, BSD+Patent grant is strictly less permissive than BSD alone. If you enforce patents against Facebook, you stand worse than with BSD alone.

The only way this could be cleared up (beyond doubt) is by a court, or very easily with a few lines from Facebook.

Re: Explaining React's license

#482

Post by geocar »

chrisco255 wrote: post #287
geocar wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also less capable and completely incompatible with router 3.

I hadn't heard that it was less capable. But you can always keep using v3 if that's what you know. He seemed to indicate that it took him a week to figure out routing in React. I have never had that much trouble.

> He seemed to indicate that it took him a week to figure out routing in React. I have never had that much trouble.

When you haven't had "that much trouble", it sounds like you're calling them stupid or a liar, and it sounds like you didn't consider the possibility that you're working on a very different problem or have a different definition of "figure out routing".

I store all of my user state in the URL. This way users can copy URLs to each other containing their state, I can press reload to debug things, Other people can embed portions of my application into iframes, and other good benefits.

However I don't want to sprinkle url changes and parsers all over my code, so I'd like to hook into the router system and glue it into the property system. I've probably been through a few versions of this idea with react and certainly spent at least a week in total trying to get it working well with all the different browsers and widgets, only to have react-router 4 come out and break it.

I then probably spent at least a day or two looking for similar-shaped hooks and couldn't find them. Maybe I should have spent more, maybe I should've been smarter.

However I note that the author of React-router took four very different approaches towards figuring out routing and produced incompatible APIs, which is a strong sign that they weren't able to figure out how routing should work either.

Re: Explaining React's license

#483

Post by bpicolo »

vonmoltke wrote: post #448
bpicolo wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Vue most likely is infringing on FB patents anyway There are zero known patents related to react.

In that case, the patent clause in the React license has zero effect.

Mmm, well it widens the range of people using software declaring their patent grant, which applies to all their other patents as well.

Re: Explaining React's license

#484

Post by ktRolster »

tgb wrote: post #422
unkown-unknowns wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry I've forgotten what the status was on the "are APIs copyrightable" question, i.e. the Oracle v Google fight. I'm kind of confused about what wikipedia says happened - there seem to be two final rulings one in favor of Oracle and one in favor of Google with Oracle appealing the second. Is it that APIs are copyrightable but duplicating them is (sometimes?) covered under fair use? Either way, I'd be a little hesit…

APIs are copyrightable. You can see here: http://www.zerobugsandprogramfaster.net/essays/x-1.html

There is still a question on fair use. Google won the jury trial, but the appellate court is ruling in a few months, and that could change everything.

Re: Explaining React's license

#485

Post by logicallee »

kevinflo wrote: post #101

I 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…

>but this is just awful.

Everyone in this whole thread is saying the same thing. For anyone not up to speed, I found the following explanation of the issue (analysis of the license) very good and short:

https://www.elcaminolegal.com/single-post/2016/10/04/Faceboo...

This lets you know why we have 300+ comments saying the same thing.

Re: Explaining React's license

#486

Post by addicted »

I cannot help but look at this along with Facebook's copy to win strategy.

It appears to me that FB might be using their open source contributions as a Trojan horse to make sure others can't compete with them. If a startup happens to use FB open source tech for their startup, FB can duplicate everything they do, even legitimately patented stuff, and the startup is unable to fight back because their sign up page happened to be built in React.

This is giving just too much power o one company.

Re: Explaining React's license

#487

Post by DannyBee »

IanKelling wrote: post #336
DannyBee wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 for patent infringement. " Every single lawyer i've ever spoken to strongly believes implied licenses will protect you very well here. Like, among us open source lawyers, it's pretty much the one thing people ag…

> Once their is an explicit grant, any implicit grant you would have gotten is extinguished. Citation needed. And if you aren't planning to sue over software patents, then the author is clearly correct that this is strictly better than BSD/MIT alone.

"Citation needed."

Seriously? This is basic IP law 101. No license can be implied if there is an explicit license.

I actually started gathering cite lists for you like I normally do, but instead, i'm not going to in this case. If you really want to argue this point, please go to google scholar and spend the 2 minutes it will take to pull up 100 cases on this.

I don't feel it's fair to argue about a thing without taking the very small amount of time to familiarize yourself with it.

If you find cases that say otherwise, awesome, let's talk about it!

Otherwise, this is like arguing about baseball and asking someone to cite rules because you want to argue that swinging at the ball and missing isn't a strike.

"then the author is clearly correct that this is strictly better than BSD/MIT alone."

They actually are not, as the scope of the implied license is much broader than the scope of the explicit grant here.

Re: Explaining React's license

#488

Post by DannyBee »

antoncohen wrote: post #186
DannyBee wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 for patent infringement. " Every single lawyer i've ever spoken to strongly believes implied licenses will protect you very well here. Like, among us open source lawyers, it's pretty much the one thing people ag…

> Once their is an explicit grant, any implicit grant you would have gotten is extinguished. The BSD license grants explicit rights to use the software, thereby granting implicit rights to use the patents in the software while using the software as it is intended to be used. The sentence "redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted" doesn't go away because there is a…

Actually, it does! Courts will not find implied licenses when there is an explicit one. That's the whole definition of implied vs explicit!

Re: Explaining React's license

#489

Post by stephenhuey »

kevinflo wrote: post #101

I 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…

I'm with you. Check out Aurelia which is under the MIT license:

http://aurelia.io/

I'm surprised at how many companies are willing to embrace frameworks that they believe come from Facebook and Google but are not truly backed by those companies. Aurelia has commercial backing and community contributors and a decent license.

Re: Explaining React's license

#490

Post by jnbiche »

Lazare wrote: post #426
jnbiche wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this is true, then why the hell is Facebook digging in like this? They're going to ruin their hard-earned open source creds for very little gain.

Probably because they don't care . They created React to solve a problem they had, they open sourced it 'cause why not, some people adopted it, some people didn't...Facebook doesn't care either way. They're not an open source company, and they don't really care how many startups use React, or how many Github stars they+ have. They don't rely on external users for testing, or external devs for contributions. It's not…

> ...Facebook doesn't care either way

I disagree. There are clearly a lot of people who evangelize React and other open source projects. It helps a lot with recruitment and Facebook's public relations among devs. I just don't think the attorneys grasp how much this is affecting other parts of the company.

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