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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

#41

Post by irrational »

zapita wrote: post #11
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…

> 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?

>But is there a viable alternative with the same level of features and ecosystem momentum?

Does it matter? At some point something else will come along and React will go the way of jQuery. And then something else will come along and supplant whatever supplanted React.

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

#42

Post by jjnoakes »

tomelders wrote: post #36
Lazare wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

More importantly, you have more protection with the BSD+Patent Grant than with BSD alone. With BSD alone, if you infringe on a Facebook patent then you are vulnerable to legal action from Facebook if they deem that you’ve infringed your patent. And regardless of wether you’d infringed or not, such action would still cost a lot of money to fight in court and would cripple most businesses. People who claim it risks giv…

> The BSD licence is objectively worse than the BSD+Patent Grant.

I'm not a lawyer, but I have heard a few claim the opposite: BSD plus the explicit restricted patent grant was worse than BSD (or MIT) with no explicit patent grant (because many believe it carries an implicit unrestricted patent grant).

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

#43

Post by y03a »

anonytrary wrote: post #32

It's ironic how one can hold utmost respect for Facebook's libraries, but be vehemently against the actual Facebook web application and their business practices.

Are you sure this move isn't just a business practice we're all too stupid to realize we should be against? I'm not. I'm not touching it. Maybe if it goes GPL.

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

#44

Post by jankassens »

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.

I would recommend taking a look at Litho (Android) and ComponentKit (iOS). Both frameworks by Facebook and inspired by the React component model for pure native development.

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

#45

Post by mbreese »

Waterluvian wrote: post #28

Are licenses retroactive? If I used a version of React that was BSD, deployed it into a bundle.js and never touched it again, did I at one point have an agreement with a BSD + Patents, and now an MIT license?

No. You’d have to re-download/deploy it.

IANAL

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

#46

Post by raquo »

anonytrary wrote: post #32

It's ironic how one can hold utmost respect for Facebook's libraries, but be vehemently against the actual Facebook web application and their business practices.

It's not at all different from loving music written by drug addicts whom you wouldn't want as friends. Software developers are people too.

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

#47

Post by dikaiosune »

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…

Since it wasnt clear from my post above, I buy all of this. But since IANAL, and I couldn't easily find a credible patent lawyer who has written publicly about this, I think it's reasonable to be measured in the claims I made. That said, you're obviously personally more familiar with the situation and having seen you around here before I'd give some weight to what you're saying. It's still a shame that it's difficult to find any public references. I also think it's a shame that there hasn't been a direct legal test/precedent for applying MIT style implicit grants to software. It might be a no brainer extension of existing precedent but to a lay person like me that doesn't quite sound like a sure bet.

Granted, the whole patent thing seemed a bit overblown to me. For the vast majority of companies, it's always seemed like you would probably have much bigger things to worry about if you thought protection from Facebook legal over UI patents was your main concern.

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

#48

Post by tomduncalf »

zebraflask wrote: post #35

I'm not surprised, React Native doesn't work nearly as well as you'd think. This is basically a piece of software you'd have to give away (IMHO).

In my experience, this is completely wrong.

We recently shipped a music making app which uses React Native for the UI, which is visually fairly rich and non-standard, including real-time rendering of shaders at 60fps responding to user input using gl-react-native and regl, and overall have been very pleased with the speed at which React Native allows you to iterate and the polish/smoothness of the resulting app; not to mention the fact that it allows us to easily make use of web developers’ existing CSS skills (as compared to writing a native app).

The fairly straightforward bridging between React Native and native code has allowed us to have an audio engine running in C++ and to communicate with it in both directions in real-time without significant overhead.

That’s not to say it’s been 100% straightforward, there were definitely a few rough patches along the way, but overall I would definitely use it again. I can easily believe that e.g. 18 months ago it may have been a much rougher experience which may explain your thoughts though!

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

#49

Post by bsimpson »

y03a wrote: post #43
anonytrary wrote: post #32

It's ironic how one can hold utmost respect for Facebook's libraries, but be vehemently against the actual Facebook web application and their business practices.

Are you sure this move isn't just a business practice we're all too stupid to realize we should be against? I'm not. I'm not touching it. Maybe if it goes GPL.

Community: All this FUD about your library licensing scares me.

FB: OK, we'll remove the part all the FUD is about.

This guy: Here's some entirely baseless FUD to replace the FUD you removed.

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

#50

Post by bad_user »

tomelders wrote: post #36
Lazare wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

More importantly, you have more protection with the BSD+Patent Grant than with BSD alone. With BSD alone, if you infringe on a Facebook patent then you are vulnerable to legal action from Facebook if they deem that you’ve infringed your patent. And regardless of wether you’d infringed or not, such action would still cost a lot of money to fight in court and would cripple most businesses. People who claim it risks giv…

Please leave such opinions to actual lawyers.

Apache placed React's BSD + PATENTS in "Category-X", banning it from being used in Apache projects:

https://react-etc.net/entry/apache-foundation-bans-use-of-fa...

> The BSD+Patent Grant was designed to combat the patent trolls, but people lost their minds and now it’s gone.

It was designed for Facebook to fight patent trolls, but not for you. In comparison with saner license like Apache 2.0, Facebook's license only applied to Facebook.

> The BSD licence is objectively worse than the BSD+Patent Grant.

That is false. Please read up on "implicit patents license".

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