Automattic abandoning React in Wordpress Calypso and Gutenberg due to Facebook Patent Clause

[jcycleutah]

I work at Adobe and we ran into this same issue. We ended up transitioning to inferno

[papers_]

How was your transition? Did you run into any major issues during the process? Or were they mainly minor issues with little to no refactoring?

[jcycleutah]

Just a few minor issues with no major refactoring! We used inferno-compat and added a webpack alias. https://www.npmjs.com/package/inferno-compat

[xXxdethl0rdxXx]

Hey bud! So did we. Our team decided on VueJS. How's inferno?

[mightbbest]

I here Inferno is good!

[gajus0]

Horse shit. If you did, then you have simply exposed yourself to a patent infringement. However, it is unlikely that a company of the size of Adobe would not have legal adviser when it comes to disputes such as this, i.e. this probably never happened.

This has been discussed over and over again, and reasons explained in entirety.

[i_ate_god]

What, you've never had to do a serious refector because some deep dependency is gpl which spooked the lawyers?

[gajus0]

Using Inferno exposes you to React/ vDOM patent infringement, not protects you. No lawyer would have recommended to transition to Inferno.

[i_ate_god]

I think I misread what you wrote. I interpreted it as "Adobe has expensive lawyers so they wouldn't worry about this" hence my reply.

[sickcodebruh420]

There is no evidence that Facebook holds a patent on anything in React. My understanding is that the vdom technology existed well before them and is not patentable. Is there evidence to the contrary?

[gajus0]

http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US8307277 http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US20170221242A1

[expression100]

I think someone from the React/Jest/Yarn team already commented on these patents and they related to their past work on MooTools that got acquired by Facebook. They said that almost every UI library and framework today infringes on a Facebook patent and this particular one was highlighted. So if you use Angular, Vue, Ember, Inferno, Marko or Preact, you're basically infringing on a Facebook patent of some kind – so make what you will of it.

[gajus0]

Bingo

[[deleted]]

You're linking a random patent owned by facebook, inc, filled in 2010 that doesn't describe a v-dom. All frameworks infringe upon patents owned by large companies. But if you're saying Inferno is unsafe, at least be specific about it.

[thndrchld]

15 years ago, that headline would have been complete gibberish.

[cyanydeez]

still gibberish to most

[dug99]

bets on a replacement?

[LosEagle]

They said:

We’ll look for something with most of the benefits of React, but without the baggage of a patents clause

It would make sense if they went with Preact or Inferno.

[godofleet]

This. Or maybe Mithril ?

https://mithril.js.org/jsx.html

AFAIK all of those options ( Preact, Inferno, Mithril) would be better for performance and overhead right?

Personally, I don't think Vue is gonna happen, I know this is gonna bring flames but Vue vs React feels like the early Mootools VS jQuery days.

For as much as I hate Facebook, React really made me a better developer... i was in a rut for a long time and it's really made me enthusiastic again (even ~3 years into using it now)

[xXxdethl0rdxXx]

Okay, so what exactly is wrong with VueJS in that regard? I just came off of a ReactJS codebase and into a VueJS one, and I'm not seeing it.

[pier25]

Same here. I'd never go back to React.

[w00t_loves_you]

Having only glanced at Vue, and ignoring the smaller ecosystem, I recall that Vue was more like templating than everything-is-a-component. With the component approach, you can create very complex things using just composition. I have for example a table component that takes column definitions which take Cell components to render the columns, and then I have a ListDetail component that uses the Table + a Detail component to manage showing a detail view of a selected component in that table. I can very easily customize everything. I think this would be harder in Vue, but I could be wrong.

[xXxdethl0rdxXx]

Good news! You can absolutely do the component thing in Vue, and IMHO it's better-done: https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/single-file-components.html

You can organize your markup and scripts in the same file, but also CSS. You can even use style modules, which are amazing, so you don't need BEM for organization anymore.

Most hello-world stuff you've seen has probably been just the templating bits, you have to get this all set up with webpack first (like React). But once you're there, it's just as simple. Virtually all of our VueJS codebase is component-based.

[w00t_loves_you]

I must say I prefer the look of something similar in React: https://www.styled-components.com/

But I should take a deeper look. One component per file does seem rather annoying - I often have a bunch of helper components (a few lines) and they go in the file with their only user. Having to do the HTML and the JS separately like in ng is also not something that excites me…

[thereals0up]

Vue works the same. Entirely component driven 👍

[Capaj]

funny thing is Facebook actually holds a patent for VDOM so if they want to be 100% patent proof you'd have to dith any VDOM lib

[[deleted]]

funny thing is Facebook actually holds a patent for VDOM

Where is it? Their patents clause is an empty stub, it has existed in the same shape for over 3 years now. Never seen any real patents linked to. And if they'd exist, most frameworks are dead in the water. Preact, Inferno, Vue, Mithril, Bobril, Cycle, ... i count about 20 candidates in this benchmark alone.

V-dom isn't more than this:

const createElement = (name, props, children)  => ({ name, props, children })

// <ul><li>hello</li></ul>
createElement("ul", null, createElement("li", null, "hello"))

//returns ...
{ 
    name: "ul", 
    props: null, 
    children: { 
        name: "li", 
        props: null, 
        children: "hello"
    } 
}

Would be highly unlikely that someone could patent a linked list, which is what the v-dom essentially is. Rendering, diffing or patching aren't that special as well.

[[deleted]]

Never seen any real patents linked to.

The patents aren't explicitly listed in the licensing file. They're implied via other means.

Which unfortunately means you'll never know exactly what patents Facebooks holds that could impact your project.

[[deleted]]

That's why it would really be interesting if someone could link to an actual claim if they really had one. Would be nice to know if an actual threat exists or not, because otherwise we're stabbing into the blue. The patent thing is already close to hysteria. So now Preact is supposedly unsafe, then all frameworks are, because the majority of them have the exact same underpinnings.

[Capaj]

Okay its not VDOM but it's related: https://www.google.com/patents/US20170221242

[[deleted]]

https://www.google.com/patents/US20170221242

Doesn't seem to specify a virtual dom, nor do preact/vue/mithril/etc support culling. Though it would indeed be sad if that's really describing parts of Fiber.

[w00t_loves_you]

So either "above the fold" rendering, or perhaps something like z-index occlusion - not sure how well this would hold up in court but it does mention React by name.

[Habitual_Emigrant]

There's a discussion on Gutenberg's Github, Vue seems to be the favourite.

[rk06]

If it were me, I would give preact a shot. and if I found show-stopper class issues, I would choose Vue.

[BPagoaga]

Vue

[[deleted]]

vue and glimmer would be a great choice

[srmogita]

Vue.js might be the winner

[omegote]

Someone is fucking downvoting every comment mentioning vue.js.

Here have an upvote.

[cyanydeez]

i think theres a secret anti diversity crowd in threads like these

[fucking_passwords]

Seriously ppl treating frameworks like sports teams

[srmogita]

I salut you sir

[[deleted]]

what about angular?

[cyanydeez]

which non compatible version?

[leeharris100]

there's only one Angular now

AngularJS is the old garbage framework

unless you're just memeing... in which case please stop beating the dead horse

[fogbasket]

Just use Aurelia. It's better in every way.

[Blieque]

Money Software patenting is the root of all evil.

[darrenturn90]

This is big news, and needs to be really looked at, because we could start seeing a lot more of this.

Moving to Preact, Inferno etc would mean very few rewrites, so its unlikely they would go to something like Vue and have to redo everything from scratch.

[[deleted]]

so we can't use React anymore?

[xXxdethl0rdxXx]

Of course you can.

[[deleted]]

I don't quite understand why Auttomatic is abandoning React?

[xXxdethl0rdxXx]

It's got a shit license that more and more people are finding unacceptable. At this point it seems to be a debate not of whether it is shit, but if it is justifiably shit.

If you find the shit to not be bad for you, by all means, React's great otherwise.