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Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js

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

#301

Post by [deleted] »

sulam wrote: post #221
carussell wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because their licence gave Facebook the upper hand if they wanted to come after you. No it didn't. Facebook made a nothing-up-the-sleeve showing; you had recourse if they decided to "come after you", because your right to countersue was something that was explicitly protected in the PATENTS grant. Removing the grant, on the other hand, contributes to a world where everyone else can come after you. That should be sc…

I work for a company with at least one lawyer dedicated to IP law and we thought about this long and hard. What it does is potentially make t prohibitive to sue FB if they violate our patents. Since we have hardware patents and they have hardware, it was distinctly possible that this could be a real problem. We decided to proceed anyway but we know we are risking something. And you can say patents suck and we shouldn…

[deleted]

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

#303

Post by [deleted] »

irrational wrote: post #205
carussell wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a response to placate folks who pick a stance based on the memes that the newstides wash up. In other words, it's not exactly good news at all, it's just a really big deal.

That's not fair. The lawyers at my company (Fortune 150) may have been irrational in forbidding us from using React, but they were hardly influenced by memes.

[deleted]

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

#305

Post by pasbesoin »

damosneeze wrote: post #37

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

So, Facebook knuckled under to increasingly intense public and commercial pressure.

In this instance.

I don't think they should be particularly rewarded for this. I think we should keep in mind what it took to get to this point.

And that, absent such pressure, individual organizations and people, and perhaps our collective society, remain at their... "mercy?"

Remain under their thumb. Whether that thumb presses down this year. Or next. Or... we just don't know.

In other words, I'd remain cautious about whether and how far I move under their umbrella -- tech-wise, or other.

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

#306

Post by rhizome »

dsacco wrote: post #226
debaserab2 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTA: > I think Facebook’s clause is actually clearer than many other approaches companies could take, and Facebook has been one of the better open source contributors out there. But we have a lot of problems to tackle, and convincing the world that Facebook’s patent clause is fine isn’t ours to take on. It’s their fight. My interpretation is that due to the negative publicity that Facebook has garnered with their lic…

Thanks for that clarification. I interpreted that paragraph to be somewhat contradictory (“we like this but we’re moving away from it because it’s not our job to convince people it’s fine”). Your interpretation makes more sense and provides better color to it.

Yes. The way I read it, Facebook essentially shirked the issue, regardless whether it's only a perception problem, onto companies like Wordpress. WP has their own users, it's not WP's job to do FB's work for them, and FB has to have known the patents clause was going to be problematic, or at least controversial.

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

#307

Post by sandGorgon »

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…

Caffe2 machine learning https://github.com/caffe2/caffe2/blob/master/PATENTS

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

#308

Post by na85 »

irrational wrote: post #182
chrisco255 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well...now back to writing code and shipping things...we can all put our irrational fantasies of patent litigation and being "unacquirable" startups due to React to rest.

It's not irrational when your companies lawyers say that you many not use React due to the licensing, and there is a very real chance you will be terminated if you do. Unless you mean that lawyers are irrational, in which case I would agree (throwing in judges and politicians and anyone else in the legal profession while we are at it).

Lawyers do what they do at the behest of their clients.

If you want to blame someone for the litigious culture in the US, blame John Q Public and the corporations he works for.

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

#309

Post by irrational »

danabramov wrote: post #283
irrational wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except not all the pieces of the React ecosystem are changing license, so... we'll probably end up staying with Vue.

Which parts do you rely on that haven’t changed it?

If we were to move to React, one of the main things we would want to use is React Native. But our lawyers have forbidden us from using any of the Facebook technologies licensed under the current licenses.

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

#310

Post by Lazare »

kelnos wrote: post #71

So... I guess I still don't understand what was wrong with BSD+Patents. I get that there's legal uncertainty: I can imagine some companies, especially larger ones, not wanting to give up their patent-suit option just because one random small team in their org is using React. And barriers to adoption aren't a great idea when one of your goals is wide adoption. Overall, though, I think making it much harder to file pat…

I think the story is this:

1. Software patents are a huge, huge, existential crisis facing our industry.

2. So huge, in fact, that nobody wants to deal with it. We can't realistically figure out if the libraries we are using are covered by patents, and given how broken issuance is, they probably are.

3. So the only practical solution is to use MIT licensed libraries, pretend there's no patent issue, and put our heads in the sand.

4. But Facebook's BSD+Patents license made us think about patents. Nobody stopped and said "can we use Angular? Are there patents on core elements of it?". But people did stop and ask that about React, because Facebook was (accidentally) making people think about patents, and the more you think about patents the more you wish you were a plumber and not a dev so all you'd have to deal with is toilets blocked with shit, and not software patents, which are much worse.

5. Now that it's under an MIT license it's just as dangerous to use React (maybe more) but we can pretend it's safe again.

Notice that Wordpress's decision to switch from React (which probably led to this) was quite clear: They were not switching due to patent concerns about React, they were switching because the non-standard license was stirring up FUD and making people ask them uncomfortable questions. (We know this because they explicitly said so, and also because the leading contender for a new library was Preact, which is strictly more dangerous from a patent point of view than React under every possible circumstance, but has a license that lets your pretend everything is okay easier.)

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