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Explaining React's license

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Re: Explaining React's license

#411

Post by azr79 »

cbuq wrote: post #64
eridius wrote: post #35

> 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 +…

They need to stop referring to React as open source software. This is proprietary source code. > We believe that if this license were widely adopted, it could actually reduce meritless litigation for all adopters, and we want to work with others to explore this possibility. They do not give a pathway for litigation with merit. This is a patent weapon.

Is Angular proprietary too?

Re: Explaining React's license

#412

Post by jnbiche »

tomelders wrote: post #378
antoncohen wrote: post #129

Facebook's license is no more dangerous than regular MIT or BSD-style licenses. If you are OK with using MIT or BSD licensed software you should be OK with using Facebook's BSD + Patents software. Here is why: MIT and BSD licenses don't have any patent grants, unlike the Apache 2.0 license. If you use MIT/BSD open source software, and some functionality of that software is patented by the author, you could be sued fo…

The problem is that the descision to use react is not longer a descision for the developers in an organisation. It's now a descision for the legal team. And thats not good. This is the situation I now find myself in. The next few months will be spent removing react and immutable from the project I'm working on because th legal department say so. This is quite frankly, bullshit.

Have you looked into preact? For most projects, it's just a few lines in webpack. Immutable js is different, but shouldn't be that much work.

Re: Explaining React's license

#413

Post by nawitus »

kenning wrote: post #394
jondubois wrote: post #385

Earlier 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.

Using polymer as a JS frontend framework wasted about a year of work at my friend's company. They eventually switched to react for one project and an in-house react replacement for the other.

I've used Polymer in three production applications and they were successes.

Re: Explaining React's license

#414

Post by christophilus »

kevinflo wrote: post #101

I love love love love love react as a technology, but this is just awful. I believe any developer not on Facebook's payroll still contributing to React or React native at this point has a moral obligation to stop. I personally feel like such a fool for not taking all this seriously before the ASF gave me a wakeup call. React is a trojan horse into the open source community that Facebook purposely and maliciously stee…

We need to start promoting a single great alternative. My vote is Preact.

Re: Explaining React's license

#416

Post by wreath »

drieddust wrote: post #301
WalterSear wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React doesn't do routing. It's a view library. And for me, the opposite was true vis-a-vis Angular and React, though got as far as making contributions to the Angular 2 tools before I decided to jumping ship.

> React doesn't do routing. It's a view library. and that's the problem. React itself solves a tiny subset and delegates the other responsibilities to different tools which may not align with each other. Most of the is spent is wiring making different choices and wiring them together. On a side note what made you move away from Angular 2 to React?

What's the problem with solving exactly one problem (and doing it fairly well). I'd rather have the possibility of choosing which routing library or state management and swap things as I see fit, than being locked in with whatever the framework chooses.

Re: Explaining React's license

#417

Post by qaq »

drieddust wrote: post #367
qaq wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Angular does not come with a patent grant at all. Vue most likely is infringing on FB patents anyway. So what is the win exactly?

Angular 2 is MIT licensed. Why you need a patent grant anyways?

because copyright and patents are orthogonal concepts. FB gives you patent grant with restrictions Google does not give you a patent grant at all.

Re: Explaining React's license

#418

Post by weinzierl »

FloDo wrote: post #375
weinzierl wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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". Richard Stallman said it is non-free [1]: > React.js is nonfree because of its patent license restriction. [1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/directory-discuss/…

> Richard Stallman said it is non-free And after actually reading it he said it's okay to use for GNU projects: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/directory-discuss/2017-01...

Thanks! I also found the following one which gives a rationale [1]. The fine distinction is that the patent grant is completely separate from the copyright license and the termination of patent grant has no influence on the copyright license whatsoever. Unfortunately these messages are not in a single thread, so it is a bit hard to find them.

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/directory-discuss/2017-01...

Re: Explaining React's license

#419

Post by belorn »

carussell wrote: post #116
jasonkostempski wrote: post #87

Earlier 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…

For context in this discussion, the patent text in GPLv3 was original a copy of the Apache 2.0 patent text. This is why Apache 2.0 and GPLv3 are compatible, since the Apache 2.0 patent text is simply a subset of the GPLv3 patent text.

Re: Explaining React's license

#420

Post by bpicolo »

qaq wrote: post #365
drieddust wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed and there is no reason to still stick with react when alternatives like vuejs and angular are available. Its not that great anyways when compared to angular 2/4. There are too many concepts to be mastered and it soon become overwhelming. I tried learning react but dropped it after spending a week when I still could not understand routing. Sense of cohesiveness between different concepts is missing. I believe s…

Angular does not come with a patent grant at all. Vue most likely is infringing on FB patents anyway. So what is the win exactly?

> Vue most likely is infringing on FB patents anyway

There are zero known patents related to react.

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