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WordPress Ditches ReactJS Over Facebook's Patent Clause (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quote TechCrunch:
Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of the popular open source web publishing software WordPress, has said the community will be pulling away from using Facebook's React JavaScript library over concerns about a patent clause in Facebook's open source license. In a blog post explaining the decision yesterday, Mullenweg said he had hoped to officially adopt React for WordPress -- noting that Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com which he also founded, had already used React for the Calypso ground-up rewrite of WordPress.com a few years ago, while the WordPress community had started using it for its major Gutenberg core project.
But he said he has changed his mind after seeing Facebook dig in behind the patent clause -- which was recently added to the Apache Software Foundation's list of disallowed licenses... [H]e writes that he cannot, in good conscience, require users of the very widely used open source WordPress software to inherit the patent clause and associated legal risk. So he's made the decision to ditch React.
Facebook can revoke their license if a React user challenges Facebook's patents.
But he said he has changed his mind after seeing Facebook dig in behind the patent clause -- which was recently added to the Apache Software Foundation's list of disallowed licenses... [H]e writes that he cannot, in good conscience, require users of the very widely used open source WordPress software to inherit the patent clause and associated legal risk. So he's made the decision to ditch React.
Facebook can revoke their license if a React user challenges Facebook's patents.
Facebook wouldn't do anything untoward, would they? I mean, they were founded on the utmost propriety and honesty, right?
React is is JavaScript wrapping HTML. Vue is easy to understand because it wraps HTML with JS. There are some state issues that vuex does not solve. but it is much better then React.
Here's the actual patent clause being discussed:
https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/blob/132013366d202dbd5d5c6463c60898bdd420055b/PATENTS
A license-invalidation could also have been written far more viral, a patent claim against any committer to the source code would result in invalidation. Add such paragraph to any project with significant traction, and with some positive thinking you might kill the entire patent-legal system.[/dreaming]
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We're moving to React, and in the past month we've lost our two best developers because of this. Two more are threatening to sue since their offer letters said they wouldn't be required to work with anything that wasn't open source. I feel the same way and might join them. Facebook is really doing a lot of damage to React with this stupidity.
IANAL but I think WP is right. I don't know WP that much, so I will give example Apache. Assume Apache embeds FB code in their product and IBM uses that to create non open-source software and sell to Amazon. Amazon then sues FB for some e-commerce patent and now Amazon loses license to use IBM software if ReactJS has any FB patent. But Amazon already paid to IBM, so IBM will have to now defend it. Surely, IBM does not want to do it and being a member of Apache, it will tell Apache not to consume ReactJS. Replace Apache with any open source software and IBM with any non open-source software company and Amazon with a customer of this non open-source software company. FB needs to come clean if it wants to truly contribute to open source.
I'll just note that "antiquated" is a really crap reason to dislike something...
To a certain extent they painted their own target. And, because the fuzzy border between legal and illegal is often the most profitable, they seem to have chosen to cover every square inch of their exterior surface with target.
They have no more interest in helping the open-source community than in altruistically providing net-neutral, balloon-internet to India.
I'd love to see them use Polymer for the Dashboard. It's the better toolkit anyway, IMHO.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
As a big company, Facebook has a big target painted on them. It's normal that they seek to protect themselves from nearly certain litigation.
Users are rejecting ReactJS, because suppose they wrote a patent-protected $1B website in ReactJS, Facebook can swoop in and copy their website. If the website sues FB, they can't because, that's what ReactJS's license says (users of React cannot sue FB).
FB is being predatory here, maybe trying create a backdoor in the React license that allows them to copy the next Snapchat like website/app.
Not a lawer obviously, but my read is that both Apache and FB have a provision that says one's grant to use its software is revoked if you sue them for patent infringement. The difference is that Apache's revocation is limited to the work itself, whereas FB's revocation is unlimited: if you sue FB for the infringement of *any* patent, then your grant to React is revoked.
So: both have a poison pill. But if you incorporate React into a product that is going to be used by a lot of downstream people, then you are putting them all at risk of losing permission to use React, just because they use your product. Not nice.
The solution is to claw back the scope. FB can still get all the protection it needs, but it has to limit that protection to one specific product at a time. It can't use React as the trojan horse to win patent protection across the board.
Good call, WordPress.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
They've got a right to their license if they wrote it, but that doesn't cause me to accept it. I just won't blame them for *that*. I reserve the right to blame them for other things independent of that.
P.S.: As a bit company, Facebook is in a good position to be a big bully. So being dubious about giving the actual legal ground is merely sensible.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Do you mean literally copy? As in source code or identical layout? if so that isn't true.
Reminder this is the same Wordpress that believes they own the copyright on any template that works with Wordpress, even if it was written from scratch and doesn't contain any derivative works.
Whatever problem WordPress has with licensing, they helped fuel it.
And what's WordPress planning anyways, suing Facebook for patent infringement sometime down the road?
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Here is a link to a question that sheds some light on aspects pretty much always overlooked in discussions. Most people don't seem to understand what the issue is because very few people participating in these discussions own patents or ever thought much about it.
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/14337/q-about-consequences-of-a-software-license-amendment-regarding-patents-facebook
Basically, the issue is this:
If a company, let's say a biotech company, owns patents - not on software, on _anything_ - finds that Facebook infringes on their patent they cannot sue them if they happen to use one of Facebook'S projects. So if Facebook were to start a spinoff that uses IP from the biomedical company they can do so, they wrote a blank check fro themselves. You have to trust them not to do that.
The above is not a statement of fact, it's the question that still is open (see link). The one answer there from yesterday (the Q itself is from Oct 2016) does not actually answer it either.
Decouple it from MySQL.
I'll just note that "antiquated" is a really crap reason to dislike something...
It's a perfectly fine reason when the thing is not standardized somehow. Old standards are still useful forever, but old non-standards are confusing forever.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Wordpress is to naive developers as credit is to naive investors.
Everything is great until the SHTF.
Are you saying that wordpress isn't the most popular cms and blogging platform? What is?
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That was two years ago. I commented on that on his blog here: https://ma.tt/2017/09/on-react...
But Vue.js has so much buzz right now and caters to people who like writing HTML-ish templates, I'd expect Automattic will go with that -- instead of Mithril.js which I feel is a better technical choice for people who prefer their UIs are defined entirety by JavaScript/TypeScript.
The below is from my comment a month ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
Personally, I feel templating approaches to making JavaScript-powered UIs like React's JSX or Angular's own templating approach or the templating systems in many other UI systems are obsolete. Modern webapps can use Mithril+Tachyons+JavaScript/TypeScript to write components in single files where all the code is just JavaScript/TypeScript. Such apps don't need to be partially written in either CSS and some non-standard variant of HTML that reimplements part of a programming language (badly). (Well, there may be a tiny bit of custom CSS needed on top of Tachyons, but very little.)
Here is an example of a coding playground I wrote that way with several examples in it which use that approach: http://rawgit.com/pdfernhout/T...
So, by writing UIs using HyperScript (plus a vdom library), you can potentially (with some work) replace a backend like Mithril with almost any other vdom or even a non-vdom solution. So, that is another way I mitigate this risk when I have a choice.
Granted, I know many web developers grew up on tweaking HTML and love HTML-looking templates and so they love JSX or whatever and are happy to ignore how hard it is to refactor such non-code stuff in the middle of their applications or validate it (granted, some IDEs are getting better at that). But I came to web development from desktop and embedded development working with systems where you (usually) generated UIs directly from code (e.g. using Swing, Tk, wxWidgets, and so on). I like the idea that standard tools can help me refactor all the code I work on and detect many inconsistencies.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
You could run "untrusted" third party plugins just fine if it was well architected, so you kinda answered many questions in one go.
Its great if you are building "nothing of value", so it's great for naive, inexperienced developers building nothing of value. Kinda like Flash back in the day.