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React Native and Yoga Both Given MIT Licence by Facebook

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Re: React Native and Yoga Both Given MIT Licence by Facebook

#21

Post by zapita »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #17
zapita wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its probably too late though and people are moving off of it to the next javascript framework. But is there a viable alternative with the same level of features and ecosystem momentum? GraphQL and React Native, in particular, seem well positioned to dominate their respective niches. That gives React a big advantage, which might counteract the licensing issues, no?

If that were true then why are they changing the licence at all? They have tooling and are well positioned but what they need is big players to also back them so that people are more incentive to buy in. That is where moving the licence to MIT makes sense.

I think we are saying the same thing. Which part of what I said do you disagree with?

Re: React Native and Yoga Both Given MIT Licence by Facebook

#22

Post by Eridrus »

DannyBee wrote: post #20
dikaiosune wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some are of the opinion that MIT includes an implicit patent grant/license. Googling around I don't see many references to support this, but there are a few: * http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Implicit_patent_licence * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License#Relation_to_Patents Regardless of armchair and/or professional legal opinions, I don't believe this has been tested in court in the US at least.

1. Actually, pretty much any serious patent licensing lawyer believes there is a grant (either explicit or implicit), because there is tons and tons and tons of caselaw on implicit patent grants (and the related principles of exhaustion), and while they don't include the word "software", the circumstances are otherwise identical. The others are mostly unable to admit it due to their client lists. The number of lawyer…

Thank you for bringing actual legal knowledge to this forum rather than the usual armchair lawyering we get.

Re: React Native and Yoga Both Given MIT Licence by Facebook

#23

Post by seanmcdirmid »

bschwindHN wrote: post #16

Neat! Yoga is a great library, I wrote Rust bindings for it: https://github.com/bschwind/yoga-rs?files=1 I eventually want a React Native esque framework but written in Rust instead of JS. Still a ways away though, I don't have much time to work on it.

What would be the point of having React Native for Rust if Rust itself is already native? Having a DOM API available in Rust?

Re: React Native and Yoga Both Given MIT Licence by Facebook

#24

Post by sillysaurus3 »

ftoo wrote: post #19
SiVal wrote: post #14

TL;DR: As far as I can tell, the news here is that Facebook is doing for React Native (& Yoga) what they recently did for React itself. In other words, in the past choosing React for crucial infrastructure put you in position where even if Facebook infringed on your IP, you could not sue them without losing the legal right to use React, potentially crippling your company. So, either use React and create an IP vulnera…

That last paragraph is the very definition of Stockholm Syndrome. Facebook is an $0.5T company built on open source. Without open source, Facebook would not have been possible.

This is correct, for what it's worth.

Re: React Native and Yoga Both Given MIT Licence by Facebook

#25

Post by nsfmc »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #6
tmwed wrote: post #5

say what you will about Facebook, this is a huge gift.

This was going to end in one of two ways: either the Facebook source-available projects would switch to a community-approved license OR the community would migrate to something else like the VueJS ecosystem. And between those two, FB definitely benefits more from being the stewards of technologies that people will continue to use.

i think the point is that all react-likes were (with high probability) infringing on at least one of facebook's patents. People were free to move to vue or whatever, but licensing wouldn't have mattered because they would still have been infringing on a software patent that didn't belong to them and that they hadn't licensed.

the closest comparison i can think of is like the mp3 patent situation. Up until this year you were free to use LAME non-commercially even though its technology was covered by patents held by fraunhoffer & thomson.

even though vue's api is different from react's in lots of significant ways, it's not really clear that vue doesn't infringe on some of facebook's patents anyway (at least i don't know what the patents are) but the impression you get from reading every single post by an ex-fb (or current) employee is that using other react-like library put you in a similar legal situation as commercial users of LAME: while it was highly unlikely that facebook would take any action against your hackathon heroku app, it was never clear that any of those libraries (or their users) were free of actual risk. At least users of react were assured they weren't going to be sued regarding any of those vdom patents held by facebook.

Re: React Native and Yoga Both Given MIT Licence by Facebook

#26

Post by purerandomness »

mwcampbell wrote: post #15
zitterbewegung wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it hurt their software adoption rate. You have very public spats by wordpress and apache over this. Think of people who couldn't convince their boss to use react / react-native because the legal department saw that PATENTS file and said NO WAY. I think they are making these moves because they see that they are going to be in a weaker position in the future and need to open their grip on these projects to ma…

What's the next JavaScript framework for non-web mobile apps though?

Oh, it's 2018, nobody uses React Native anymore.

We're using Weex [1] or NativeScript [2] now.

[1] https://weex.incubator.apache.org/

[2] https://www.nativescript.org/

Re: React Native and Yoga Both Given MIT Licence by Facebook

#27

Post by Lazare »

SiVal wrote: post #14

TL;DR: As far as I can tell, the news here is that Facebook is doing for React Native (& Yoga) what they recently did for React itself. In other words, in the past choosing React for crucial infrastructure put you in position where even if Facebook infringed on your IP, you could not sue them without losing the legal right to use React, potentially crippling your company. So, either use React and create an IP vulnera…

> In other words, in the past choosing React for crucial infrastructure put you in position where even if Facebook infringed on your IP, you could not sue them without losing the legal right to use React

It hardly matters now, but as gets pointed out every time this gets brought up, this is quite false.

You would lose the legal right to use any patents which Facebook might (or might not!) have on React. You did not lose the seperate BSD license on the actual code with grants you your license to "use react".

> Using React no longer increased your vulnerability with respect to IP or lawsuits pertaining to Facebook.

That's highly debatable. If Facebook does have patents on React (and it is believed they do), then using React, or any technology that uses the same underlying technology does, in fact, increase your vulnerability to IP disputes and lawsuits from Facebook. :) The implicit patent grant in the MIT/BSD license will help, but so did the (now removed) explicit patent grant, so it's hardly clear this is a win on net.

The situation has never been as simple as people seem to wish it was. Software patents are an enormous and (so far) unsolved burden on our industry. At least if you're in countries where they are enforcable (and given the nature of the global legal system, probably even if you aren't).

Re: React Native and Yoga Both Given MIT Licence by Facebook

#30

Post by bschwindHN »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #23
bschwindHN wrote: post #16

Neat! Yoga is a great library, I wrote Rust bindings for it: https://github.com/bschwind/yoga-rs?files=1 I eventually want a React Native esque framework but written in Rust instead of JS. Still a ways away though, I don't have much time to work on it.

What would be the point of having React Native for Rust if Rust itself is already native? Having a DOM API available in Rust?

The goal would be a higher amount of code sharing and perhaps a more consistent way to organize data and logic across platforms.

React Native runs a JS VM in a separate thread and communicates to the native platform code (Java and objective c) to tell it where to draw things. The native code then passes things like touch events back to the JS thread.

I want to replace the JS thread with native code to hopefully increase performance and gain advantages from Rust such as its nice type system and the Cargo ecosystem.

I have a proof of concept running Tokio and Serde to talk back and forth on Android between Java and Rust but it doesn't do much yet. Needs a lot more time to get anything serious going.

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