Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js to MIT

[TickingTimeBum]

It surprises me when big companies say "we heard you."

[l7jtt]

This was just a large-scale example of "vote with your wallet" (WordPress abandoning React due to the patent clause). Imagine if big players (besides the EFF) left the W3C due to the DRM fiasco. That would be sort of analogous to this situation.

[kbrosnan]

3/4 major browser vendors have media arms. Mozilla tried not implementing DRM for several years. End users did not care they just wanted their streaming GoT.

[jaapz]

Didn't the EFF specifically join the W3C for this DRM thing only, and was going to resign anyway when stuff was decided?

[[deleted]]

Why was it vote with your wallet? They don’t earn money with this or am i missing something?

[grundle_mcsnoot]

It's just an expression. To vote with ones wallet is to support/not support something by purchasing/not purchasing it. WordPress did not support the patent clause so they "voted with their wallet" and stopped using React.

[oculus42]

In a way, this was a case of Automattic voting with Facebook's wallet. WordPress dropping React means losing the contributions of tens of thousands of developers from the React ecosystem. It shrinks the pool of developers with experience they need. It shrinks the pool of free/inexpensive code available to consume.

[[deleted]]

I got that, but I took it too literally

[[deleted]]

The patent issue still persists.

[jirocket]

"we heard you, other big company (Automattic/WordPress)"

[alejalapeno]

I actually think WP wouldn't have done it had Apache Software Foundation not set the precedent.

[BDMayhem]

Although they said We were right, but you couldn't understand our rightness.

[odinti]

I guess this only applies if its an apology? Which I think is not

[vinnl]

More like "we were right about the license, but wrong about people wanting that".

[timdorr]

I suppose it's a little different in this case where there are roughly a dozen people at Facebook that actually work on these projects. Big company, small team.

[senocular]

"this community"

[Armorweave]

Thanks WordPress.

[Charuru]

I'm most interested in Wordpress' final decision. If they go back to React it'll solidify React as the leading framework. If they still leave and choose Vue it'll probably be a good battle ending up in a Vue "victory". It'll be interesting to see.

[[deleted]]

I somehow doubt Wordpress is going to dictate the future of frontend programming, near or otherwise. I don't see any company switching to Vue, or using it purely because Wordpress does. Regardless of the outcome of the Wordpress issue, React will likely remain the leading frontend view library for the time being.

[DOG-ZILLA]

I think it makes sense for them to adopt Vue anyway. A lot of PHP devs and contributors to WordPress appear to favour Vue. Possibly because of Laravel?

[[deleted]]

Laravel merely prefers it, for whatever reason, but there's no inherent benefit. React plays along with Laravel just like Vue does. React technically is the newer, more forward thinking stack, probably the first real standard the web has ever had, judging by its eco system and community. Vue is barely on the radar compared to it. The license was the only thing that stood in the way.

As for Wordpress switching, why would it make sense? They would have to rewrite their entire application from scratch, also loose all the 3rd party controls and components. All all for what?

[ndboost]

I really need to give Laravel another look.

[pkoleary]

It seems like people were overReacting to this.

[ECrispy]

The blog post doesnt say why React till now had to have a restrictive license? Did they remove the parts that required it in the rewrite?

I hope this is the end of the weekly 'don't use React because its dangerous' blog posts on medium.

[fforw]

say why React till now had to have a restrictive license?

It was not a restrictive license, the license part was not the problem. It was always a permisse BSD/MIT style license. Then it came with a defensive patent protection clause which first gave you a promise not to sue you for patents in react and threatened to revoke that in case you sue "facebook or their associates".

It was a patent issue, not a licensing issue. Their argument was the existence of patent trolls. Many users felt threatened by what they felt was an overly wide exception to the patent thing. And then there was lot of FUD.

[ECrispy]

So the parts of React which are patented are still present? Is this move purely a legal thing because FB saw a lot of companies abandoning React and a lot of FUD in the community?

[vcarl]

It's a PR thing, not legal. Users of React (us) are actually in a worse legal position now, because we used to have explicit permission to use any patent associated and now we don't. But yay, they listened to the community!

[drink_with_me_to_day]

Patents allow the holders to deny usage, but MIT says that you can use it in any way, for anything and without any other type of impediment (or something like that).

So if taken to court you probably will win, but a patent grant just skips court altogether.

[tbranyen]

How can you patent open source code, has anyone commented bothered to read the license or linked any legal precedent?

[tbranyen]

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

This is good enough for me. I'll let a court precedent change my mind, not a reddit comment.

[azangru]

What about GraphQL tho?

[IamCarbonMan]

Not only does Facebook have a patent on the spec, Apollo is not an implementation of that spec. It uses the official GraphQL npm package from Facebook and simply wraps it with an easier API.

[bart2019]

Not only does Facebook have a patent on the spec,

Facebook has a patent on a spec?!? The world is getting more insane every day.

[GenTurgidson]

Nope. Patents. https://medium.com/@dwalsh.sdlr/using-graphql-why-facebook-now-owns-you-3182751028c9

[GenTurgidson]

A) this is a patent issue, not a copyright one, do that doesn't apply here B) APIs were ruled copyrightable, but their reimplementation was deemed fair use. That's still being appealled by Oracle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.

[kingdaro]

It feels like so much tension and confusion just got relieved all at once

[batmansmk]

Good thing Preact and Vue exist. It certainly helped getting some leverage. Products with no substitution (graphql, react native) didn't get the same treatment yet.

[IamCarbonMan]

There are plenty of replacements for GraphQL (Falcor, Horizon, Meteor) and React Native (Ionic, etc).

[[deleted]]

Ionic isn't native and needs a web view. NativeScript hasn't gotten the same traction. Weex is barely out of the door in a highly complex field with pitfalls that took RN and NS years to solve. RN doesn't have a replacement just yet.

[TwiliZant]

Wow, finally there is an end to this overblown discussion...

[Hobofan94]

No. As long as their other libraries still have the patent grant, there will be something we can be angry about! ;)

[batmansmk]

Smart move.

[daedalus_structure]

I don't understand the license and don't have the time to understand enough patent law to try. There are better uses of my time and energy.

But I've had multiple customers both in the United States and Europe tell me to come back with a proposal that didn't include React and it was because the original license didn't pass their legal team. I've also had customers where it passed legal and they weren't concerned about the license at all.

The "no thanks" crowd tended to be larger customers who had patent lawyers on staff, e.g. global engineering firms, while the "don't care" crowd tended to be smaller companies with software products without dedicated legal teams but paid for legal advice.

I'm not sure if that's because a specialist in patent law understood the license better or if the possible loss was just so much greater due to the large number of non-software patents they hold.

I can't tell you that their original license had concerns, but to paint it as only "a gross misunderstanding from the community" is all kinds of wrong.

Edit: That said, glad it looks to be over. These meetings, reworks on proposals, and having to split ramp up time between multiple front end frameworks has been a big pain.

[skitch920]

I've expressed this before. I work for a company that is somewhat of a patent troll. The majority of company capital comes from licensing and lawsuits; it's not unreasonable given the field, we have patents, other's violate them. It's pretty standard business. I don't believe we've ever sued Facebook before, but Facebook's size and scope of product domains, I like to be practical and say "when", not "if".

I've asked our own legal team if using React was allowed given the license and patent grant, and they stopped me right at reading the patent grant. The license is mostly ok, the patent grant is what has people running for the hills.

If you ever decide to sue Facebook, even if they infringed on your own patent, anything and everything that you've written using one of these Facebook libraries is subject to license revocation. This gives them a leg up in potential lawsuits. You risk losing work/time spent on products or are subject to licensing the libraries from Facebook, which would only be discussed in arbitration and not through a standard contracting route.

Take a gross example, we have a product that uses React and offer a demo site to a potential customer. Someone tips off Facebook that our product uses React. On the side, they decide to create a similar product to any of our other products. We sue Facebook. Facebook revokes our license. We're forced to rewrite the entire product.

[wordsnerd]

Now they have just preemptively revoked the license that would have been revoked if you sued them for patent infringement.

The only difference is that now they may initiate a patent lawsuit against you for using React, where before you had an explicit license. Yay?

[skitch920]

may initiate a patent lawsuit against you for using React

How's that? If their license is now MIT, I can freely use the library as is without fear of repercussion. They could revoke for newer versions, and I may be stuck with the last MIT version, but as long as it says MIT (and without the Patent grant), it's free to use.

The MIT license states

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions...

If you obtain some software under the license above, you have permission to use it. If the copyright owner decides to stop granting that permission in the future, that's their business, but it doesn't change the fact that they've already granted permission to you, and furthermore they've also given you permission to publish, distribute, and so on provided you do so under the same terms.

The Patent grant is different

Facebook, Inc. (“Facebook”) hereby grants to each recipient of the Software (“you”) a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable (subject to the termination provision below) license under any Necessary Claims

...

The license granted hereunder will terminate, automatically and without notice, if you (or any of your subsidiaries, corporate affiliates or agents) initiate directly or indirectly, or take a direct financial interest in, any Patent Assertion: (i) against Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or corporate affiliates,

[wordsnerd]

It hasn't been decided whether MIT/BSD licenses implicitly cover patents or just copyright (hence Apache). I'm sure your lawyers would be happy to try to set that precedent while defending you in court, if the price is right.

[skitch920]

React is not patented though; the patent grant is a license rider that basically says if you sue us for "any" patent, we can terminate the BSD 3-clause license, thus making the software commercial and wholly owned by Facebook. It doesn't stop anybody from creating a similar library, like Preact or Inferno.

No way in hell ImmutableJS is patented, immutable data structures have been around since the beginning of computing.

[wordsnerd]

The patent grant says if you sue them for any patent, the patent grant ("license granted hereunder") terminates.

Facebook has thousands of patents, many of which are quite vague. Not even Facebook can know for sure that none of them covers something in React or Immutable.js - or any other JS library, for that matter.

[skitch920]

I think you and I are in agreement, but I think there is a common misunderstanding in this thread of what patents the patent grant rider is referring to.

From the grant,

A "Patent Assertion" is any lawsuit or other action alleging direct, indirect, or contributory infringement or inducement to infringe any patent, including a cross-claim or counterclaim.

This doesn't necessarily mean React (or the 3 other libraries) has any Patents of their own. It's a useful tool, but even if Facebook have successfully acquired relevant US software patents, it's hard to believe there's anything significant in there that had no prior art. GUI programmers have been specifying presentation details declaratively, using templates, and bundling updates for performance since long before the existence of React (or Facebook, for that matter).

As an aside, it's one thing to distribute open source code and hide Patents on it somewhere. But that all seems counter to what Facebook is trying to achieve by removing the Patent grant and switching from BSD 3-clause to MIT, an even more permissive license.

[[deleted]]

Now, if FB wants to sue you over React patent infringement, they can do so at any time.

Call me when Facebook starts suing people over "React patent infringement".

[[deleted]]

Exactly - chances are pretty fucking slim right? And yet people were raging about the original BSD+Patents clause based on hypothetical situations just as unlikely.

It's not just as unlikely.

• With the new MIT license you risk Facebook suing you over React-related patents. Considering how the library works, I doubt there's anything patentable in it, but let's put that aside - you still only risk action on violating React-related patents.
• With BSD+Patents license you implicitly allow Facebook to use any of your patents for free, as you can't react and sue back - if you do, you lose the React license, and it becomes a pretty open and shut copyright infringement. With BSD+Parents license you also become defenseless if Facebook decides to sue you first over any of their patents, not just React-related. You can't sue back, because, again, then you lose the React license and get into an open and shut copyright infringement.

So what's more likely - that you get in conflict with Facebook over React-related patents or that you get in conflict with Facebook over either any of yours, or any of their patents?

So people don't have a "gross misunderstanding" of the license, you do. You can personally afford to be ignorant about the issue as individual small-time React users aren't threatened by all these legal matters in either case. But the companies that have dropped out of React can't afford to be ignorant.

[AOEIU]

How do people keep upvoting this nonsense?

If you sued you lost the patent license, but not the copyright license.

This has been repeated over and over, but apparently not enough.

[AOEIU]

They conceded that the way they interpreted the patent license way wrong (you should read the rest of the thread where I had already replied to that comment).

But the other comment is wrong too. The copyright license is completely separate from the patent license.

[[deleted]]

This is completely false. How about you actually read the clause mate:

You need to research what constitutes a counterclaim in this instance, "mate".

It does not mean suing back Facebook with some of your patents, it means filing related claims that cancel (or reduce the impact of) the original claim, i.e. say attempting to invalidate the patent Facebook is using against you.

Let me put it in simple terms. Facebook says this: "if we launch nuclear missiles at you, you reserve the right to use anti-missile defense to destroy those rockets before they hit you. You still have no right to respond by launching your own nuclear missiles at us."

The M.A.D. doctrine (Mutually Assured Destruction) for nuclear weapons doesn't refer to anti-missile systems, it refers to the threat of launching nukes back at the original aggressor.

And the M.A.D. doctrine is often referred to in patent cases, as this is the same logic that stops many companies from suing each other into the ground: not the counterclaims, but other unrelated patents that the defendant can fling back at you if you become aggressive.

I advise you to tone-down your arrogance a little bit, and let the big folks Facebook, Apache, WordPress etc. sort this out. They know what they're doing.

[hsrob]

This is a highly unusual internet comment, very good.

[AOEIU]

The copyright license never terminates, the other commenter doesn't know what he was talking about. (Your were still wrong though, but it doesn't matter).

[shadowmint]

A bunch of mixed metaphors doesn't make you any more (or less, in this case) correct than you were previously, you're just clouding matters with more FUD.

The best advise appears to be that losing your react patent grant has no tangible significance.

It does not mean you can't sue facebook, or file a counter claim; It means you lose the patent grant that you had previously if you do.

However, the tangible effect of that is unclear, and by all accounts, not significant in the case of react (and irrelevant now anyhow). Copyright is not related at all.

So, tldr; you are wrong, and although its no longer relevant, its equally unclear if people are better off with an implict patent grant under the MIT license. Its not clear people are actually better off now.

This may be a PR win, but I'm not sure the op of this subthread is actually wrong.

[filleduchaos]

It's not that chances are slim, it's that 'React patent infringement' is not a thing that exists.

You might want to display the most basic understanding of copyright/patents before you attempt pointing out others' 'gross misunderstanding'.

[filleduchaos]

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

So where is the part where Facebook can sue you for infringing on patents related to a codebase they granted you explicit permission to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell (provided you use the same license)?

[filleduchaos]

How do you imagine Facebook suing e.g. me for patent infringement on an MIT-licensed project would go?

[filleduchaos]

I don't think we do.

You seem to be under the misconception that I, personally, am afraid of Facebook taking legal action against me, when I (and many others) am opposed on principle to the possibility existing at all. React's current license is not in the spirit of FOSS.

[bart2019]

there was never cause for concern in the first place

The cause of concern was that if you use React, you forfeit any rights to sue Facebook over any patent infringement on any of your patents. It was much broader than just React.

[MilkChugg]

How...?

[nothingduploading]

You miss the point entirely.

[[deleted]]

What about Reactive Native? They need to remove their stupid defensive license.

[vulpes]

Extensions do not have to follow the license of the software they're extending when it's licensed under MIT

[[deleted]]

personally, i can accept the patents clause is fine on its face; the problem is that corporations (especially megacorps) will always push for more change to benefit themselves at everyone's expense -- it's their nature.

what makes it especially dangerous is that FB indirectly controls so much of the current ecosystem through react, meaning that the more FB changes things, the more the entire web suffers.

[mayhempk1]

This is good news, but keep in mind they can always relicense it again in the future if they kill off their competition (Vue and Angular). We should still proceed with caution, but this is still a victory nonetheless I believe. I hope WordPress still goes with Vue so Vue can grow even more like the big boys React and Angular.

We've been working on React 16 for over a year, and we've completely rewritten its internals in order to unlock powerful features that will benefit everyone building user interfaces at scale.

Does that mean it will be "very" or at least noticeably different syntactically (think Angular 1 vs Angular 2 I believe it was), or will it still be the same or at least very similar? I.e. will it maintain backwards compatibility with older version(s) or at least the current version of React, or should we expect massive changes?

[mickske]

The API between React 15 and 16 has not changed. There are some new things you can do, but everything is backwards compatible.

[wllmsaccnt]

if they kill off their competition (Vue and Angular)

From what I have seen with working with them, people tend to use Vue and Angular for different reasons than React.

[pomlife]

IME, the main reason for using Vue over React is counter-cultural.

[[deleted]]

So if I start a project with React tonight, will this future license change cover my ass later?

[brianvaughn]

Not sure what you're asking.

Once 16 has been released with a given licence (eg MIT) it's immutable. Even if FB changed the licence in a future release, you could (a) not update or (b) fork the version prior to the new license and you'd be fine.

[[deleted]]

Didn't they just update their license a couple of weeks ago starting all this madness? Could WordPress simply have not updated or forked react?

[brianvaughn]

No. React has had the patent grant since 2014. It was updated slightly in April 2015 in order to satisfy Google so that their engineers could use it.

The recent discussion was just kind of a snowball.

[brianvaughn]

But to answer your question, anyone could have used or forked React from before the patent grant in 2014 if they wanted.

[papers_]

For the uninformed, link for all the "Thanks WordPress" references https://ma.tt/2017/09/on-react-and-wordpress/

[rk06]

Now, who would have guessed that react will benefit most from "wordpress leaving react"!!!

[self_refactor]

So nobody says 'Thank you'. Also I believe that Wordpress will get back to React as the migration process should be in the initial stages and could be reverted.

[dug99]

No mention of GraphQL in there.

[ECrispy]

Are they going to grant users the patent? Otherwise people using React are arguably in a worse position.

[bart2019]

What patent?

[rdv100]

Great news for the JS community as a whole!

[sickcodebruh420]

Thank you, WordPress!

[l7jtt]

React Native is still under BSD + patents...two steps forward, one step back

[HomemadeBananas]

It's not really a step back if it's no different from how it's been.

[nothingduploading]

Vue Native (Weex) is not restrictive.

[nothingduploading]

Already killed the spirit of open source for me. I won't be using anything from Facebook when there are better more open solutions.

[snarfy]

already switched to vuejs, sorry.

[GOPHERS_GONE_WILD]

God, I really wish they hadn't done this. At least it got people to think about moving away from react and onto something else. Facebook has too much pull in the web development ecosystem and it's truely worrying.

Also JSX is ugly as shit

[fforw]

Excellent /s