Wrt. the idea that without the grant, Facebook can sue you. A) There's this thing with "implicit grant" since they've open sourced it and grant you a license. But even without this, and more interestingly, B) If they sue anybody for anything regarding React, wouldn't they immediately loose the entire community around React? "Damn, they really sued Widgets Inc. over some bs. patent in React, better stop using this minefield right away"..
Explaining React's license
581–590 of 622 posts
Re: Explaining React's license
#582Earlier quoted context omitted.
> be a win for free/open source software Any project with such a license would be non-free, so I'm not sure how that would be a win for free software.
> 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…
Shortly after posting this, I came across IanKelling's link [1] to the GNU post on Software Patents. I've definitely been conflating copyright and patents in my mind. Thanks for the clarification.
Re: Explaining React's license
#583Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
As I said in my article [1]: Patents protect ideas and inventions. In most cases, patent assertion cases are not black or white — win or loose. Infringement evaluation is complex and costly. A lawsuit can cost hundreds of thousands or millions to file and pursue. You might have a 85% confidence that FB violated a patent of yours, but to even pursue it it’s going to cost you a lot of money. If on top of that, you will…
So ultimately patents boil down to the deepest pockets. Not that I'm naive, but that's a pretty shitty way to do such things.
Re: Explaining React's license
#584Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I said in my article [1]: Patents protect ideas and inventions. In most cases, patent assertion cases are not black or white — win or loose. Infringement evaluation is complex and costly. A lawsuit can cost hundreds of thousands or millions to file and pursue. You might have a 85% confidence that FB violated a patent of yours, but to even pursue it it’s going to cost you a lot of money. If on top of that, you will…
Thank you. You pretty eloquently summed up my thoughts about this entire situation. I'm sad, because Facebook runs some pretty cool open source projects. But I will no longer contribute to them if this is their attitude. It's about as far from community-oriented as I can imagine.
FB would be happy to replace the internet with Facebook. I think we've all known this for some time now. It's not their attitude, it's their entire reason for being. It's a form of totalitarianism that we don't have a word for; that's beyond most people's imagination.
It would be fitting for FB to change their motto (?) to "We're not evil either." Lol
Re: Explaining React's license
#585> 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. 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 +…
> 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. I think it's pretty clear how disingenuous this is since they don't even constrain the patent revocation to IP lawsuits. If they were doing this in good faith they would want to scope this as tightly as they c…
Nice username ;)
Re: Explaining React's license
#586Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or there is Google's Polymer framework. In my opinion, Polymer is better than React and Vue. I could never bring myself to use React because of its liense terms.
The downside of polymer is that it doesn't really play nicely with modern toolchains.
Yeah because with Polymer you don't even need a toolchain.
I hate toolchains and their clunky 10+ seconds compile step.
Re: Explaining React's license
#587Earlier quoted context omitted.
google is pretty bad at frontend frameworks from my experience :D Polymer is an experiment that should have stayed in that state.
I'd argue that google is pretty strong when it comes to frameworks, and that most of their criticism comes from people who aren't looking for a framework, but rather a library (like React). And Polymer isn't even really either of those things, it's a polyfill for a native browser feature.
Polymer is not a polyfill for web components - it is higher level library - something like "jquery for web components" - WC polyfill is separate project, in separate repo - you will need it with X-Tags, Svelte, SkateJS too.
Re: Explaining React's license
#588So, i feel for them, having watched Google's open source projects be targeted by patent trolls in the past. But i really don't think this is the way forward. A few things: 1. If you want to suggest you are doing this as part of an attempt to avoid meritless litigation, you really should give concrete examples of that happening. Otherwise, it comes off as a smoke screen. 2. The assertion is that if widely adopted, it…
Here's another theoretically possible outcome of wide adoption of something without any patent licence:
Google is able to use other people's technology at will because nobody can afford to not use their stuff, and no startup that they decide to take technology from, and say "no more Google/Angular/Closure Library/etc for you" could realistically launch an effective lawsuit before they died.
Re: Explaining React's license
#589Earlier quoted context omitted.
What protection? The PATENTS takes rights away from Facebook, and gives rights to grantees. Facebook is in a stronger position without it. They added it to be nice. Without patents file: - Facebook can sue you for any reason, including react related patent infringement - You have no patent grant for anything in react - You can sue Facebook for anything, including patent infringement. With patents file: - Facebook can…
Wrong. Without patents file there is an implicit patent grant.
I was wondering about this as I hadn't heard of it before. Found this http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Implicit_patent_licence .
It seems like yes it's true that there is an implicit grant, but it's not well established in case law.
Re: Explaining React's license
#590Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
A more likely explanation is that these large orgs employ real lawyers who looked at the licence and grant and who then approved the use of react because they are professional lawyers who actually understand the legalities involved, unlike 99% of the commenters in this thread.
I suspect the real reason is that these large companies already have large patent war chests, so any suit from FB could incite countersuits from them. They have a measure of impunity and thus their exposure to risk is much less than that of smaller companies and startups.