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Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js

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Re: Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js

#261

Post by tzs »

tytso wrote: post #120
nostrademons wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Implied patent licenses: https://www.wilmerhale.com/pages/publicationsandnewsdetail.a... https://copyleft.org/guide/comprehensive-gpl-guidech7.html Basically, if you sell or license a product that requires a patent to work, courts have generally held that you grant an implied patent license for any patents that the product might require. If you explicitly reference patents within the license, however, then whatever t…

Furthermore, suppose you're some company like, say, IBM which figured out some way to say, safely double the energy density and recharge cycles of Lithium Ion batteries, which you have patented. Let's also assume that you are shipping some critical problem which is dependent on React. Facebook could now freely use your patented idea, and violating it left, right, and center, and if you try to sue them for violating t…

> Facebook could now freely use your patented idea, and violating it left, right, and center, and if you try to sue them for violating that patent, you're completely fcked.

Maybe, maybe not. You suing them over your patent would terminate you patent* license from Facebook, but not your copyright license. Whether that fucks you or not depends on whether or not you actually NEED a patent license from Facebook.

As far as I know, no one has actually found a Facebook patent that covers React.

Re: Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js

#262

Post by JoshMnem »

markyuckerberg wrote: post #239

As the old saying goes, you will eventually run into someone who doesn't give a fuck who or how powerful you are. Meet your Daddy, Facebook. He is called Automattic. :-) As for people who think the exodus out of React was "imaginary" - I wish FB had actually completely dropped the ball and stayed with the old license. That would have forced Automattic to not merely drop React, but also anoint a competitor which would…

I still think that projects like Vue will pass React soon. Facebook only did the right thing because they saw the impending backlash. The PATENTS file is still in their other repos.

Re: Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js

#264

Post by bigbassroller »

samirillian wrote: post #249
damosneeze wrote: post #37

Thank you, Wordpress.[1] [1] https://ma.tt/2017/09/on-react-and-wordpress/

Though I am a bit curious about why WordPress would need React in the first place. It's not like they're building a real-time app. Am I missing something here?

Wordpress has a pretty good JSON api that you can use with crud operations: https://wordpress.org/plugins/rest-api/

There's also already a theme that uses React: https://themes.redradar.net/foxhound/

With those two things you could build a pretty good web app. The only thing is you'd be in WordPress land and isn't glamorous.

Re: Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js

#265

Post by JoshMnem »

valarauca1 wrote: post #251

Well this idiotic. BSD+Patents would terminate its patent grants if ever yourself and Facebook entered litigation. Implying Facebook would add a patent suit to their defense/offense. Now they STILL get too! Buuut they look like a good guys. MIT says nothing about Patents. So they can sue _anyone_ using React for patent violations now. —— People should keep the pressure up until they license under Apache2. Then the…

I'm not a lawyer, but doesn't BSD/MIT has an implicit patent grant? It would be absurd for a company to argue that they put their software out there for everyone to freely use, but "JUST KIDDING -- we secretly didn't give you rights to use the related patents that we didn't tell you about."

It would be interesting to see the backlash if a company ever tries that one. They would probably lose a lot of their own developers as well.

Re: Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js

#266

Post by octalmage »

irrational wrote: post #191
_eht wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must have missed a lot of news. A personal example: in my company we were comparing React vs Vue internally and the hint of licensing issues committed us to Vue. This Facebook post gives us hope for GraphQL moving away from BSD+, as it is currently in our stack, but without doubt we are considering a move away due to uncertainty.

The same thing happened at my company (Fortune 150 company). We settled on Vue too, and it has been amazing. But if this had happened back when we were considering things we probably would have gone with React.

Same here, this conversation is happening right now since we've built a pretty large application using React. I would much prefer to use React so this couldn't be better timing.

Re: Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js

#267

Post by nebabyte »

blaqkangel wrote: post #11

That was incredibly unexpected. Facebook may very well end up in the majority's good graces with this move. I wonder how some of the bigger players will react (no pun intended) after their abandonment of React in lieu of Vue or some other framework. Interesting times indeed.

> I wonder how some of the bigger players will react (no pun intended) after their abandonment of React in lieu of Vue or some other framework

What do you expect them to do, shrug and come back? I doubt anyone who left based on concerns with their stack being owned by Facebook is likely to regret weaning themselves off of it.

Re: Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js

#268

Post by bsimpson »

cies wrote: post #140

So which FB project still have a BSD+patents license. I count: * ReasonML - https://github.com/facebook/reason/blob/master/PATENTS.txt * GraphQL - https://github.com/graphql/graphql-js/blob/master/PATENTS * react-native - https://github.com/facebook/react-native/blob/master/PATENTS * PlanOut - https://github.com/facebook/planout/blob/master/PATENTS * Flow - https://github.com/facebook/flow/blob/master/PATENTS * Haxl…

Rebound, their spring physics implementation for Android (Java) and the Web (JavaScript)

Re: Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js

#269

Post by swyx »

LibertyBeta wrote: post #215
irrational wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, we've already settled on Vue (because our lawyers forbade us from using React), but now I'm sure they would approve React. So... do we abandon our work on Vue (which so far is amazing) to switch to React since the React ecosystem is so large, or do we stay the course? Sigh. I wish Facebook had made this change a year ago.

I would stay with Vue. While the react world is bugger it's mostly made up of competing solutions instead of distinct tasks. That said, this healthy Vue/Angular/React competition has been great for us devs.

"great" is relative to how much free time you have evaluating all the various alternatives and finding the bugs/missing use cases nobody cares to tell you about up front..

Re: Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js

#270

Post by chc »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #252
chc wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually a common policy when it comes to patents. If you are found to infringe on a patent and it can be shown that you knew about it, the penalties are much harsher. This is one of the many reasons people consider the patent system to be badly broken.

Is there no similar penalty for intentionally foregoing due diligence specifically to avoid harsher penalties?

AFAIK, no. I don't know of any case law that says the reason you were unaware of the patent is relevant; just whether the infringement was "willful" — one component of which being knowledge of the patent.
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