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Facebook Relents, Switches React, Flow, Immuable.js and Jest To MIT License (theregister.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes the Register:
Faced with growing dissatisfaction about licensing requirements for some of its open-source projects, Facebook said it will move React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js under the MIT license next week. "We're relicensing these projects because React is the foundation of a broad ecosystem of open source software for the web, and we don't want to hold back forward progress for nontechnical reasons," said Facebook engineering director Adam Wolff in a blog post on Friday. Wolff said while Facebook continues to believe its BSD + Patents license has benefits, "we acknowledge that we failed to decisively convince this community"... Wolff said the updated licensing scheme will arrive next week with the launch of React 16, a rewrite of the library designed for more efficient operation at scale.
Facebook was facing strong criticism from the Apache Software Foundation and last week Wordpress.com had announced plans to move away from React.
"Wolff said Facebook considered a license change for its other open-source projects, but wasn't ready to commit to anything," the Register adds. "Some projects, he said, will keep the BSD + Patents license."
Facebook was facing strong criticism from the Apache Software Foundation and last week Wordpress.com had announced plans to move away from React.
"Wolff said Facebook considered a license change for its other open-source projects, but wasn't ready to commit to anything," the Register adds. "Some projects, he said, will keep the BSD + Patents license."
So one argument i've seen that suggests why we should trust them now is that this is a direct benefit to Facebook. Having a much larger userbase will help improve React faster.
But Facebook is just another publicly traded company and so short term profit is the most important goal. What's stopping Facebook from doing something in the future that complicates matters?
We're all much better off with websites without ever more javascript dependencies.
Top of the thread.
... seems /. 'authors' publish via copy+paste and adapting titles via their latest Google Pixel.
I trust devs who use the MIT license more than I trust devs who use the GPL or other proprietary licenses.
The MIT license gives the Five Essential Freedoms of Free/Libre Open Source Software:
1) The freedom to use.
2) The freedom to redistribute.
3) The freedom to modify and not redistribute.
4) The freedom to modify and redistribute, with the modified source code included.
5) The freedom to modify and redistribute, with the modified source code not included.
The GPL, on the other hand, does not. It doesn't give us Essential Freedom 5. Some people are even unsure about how well it gives us Essential Freedoms 2 through 4, as well.
I know that devs who use the MIT license care about freedom. The same can't be said about devs who choose to use restrictive licenses like those in the GPL family.
Writing JavaScript to support a HTML template is what web design should be like. Writing JavaScript with HTML sprinkled in not the way the HTML was designed. jQuery a way to deal with advance web pages before polyfil, React is just super jQuery. Angular is good but too restrictive and formal. Vue is the best so far. but still not there. I believe parent / child communication should be easier, messages and props create a clean interface but it is limited.
The echo-system is too dependent on React!
Don't foolishly walk toward vendor lock-in.
Seek alternatives.
Nah, Vue is shit. Stick to your jQuery trash grandpa -- are you a PHP man too? The world has moved on.
Good move, Facebook.
I've leave this stuff to the FaceLemmings.
One word: Parse.
But this time is different.
An extremely positive development for FB. I'm a little surprised they went all the way back to MIT. Even Apache has a claw-back provision, but its scope is limited to lawsuits over the product itself, not lawsuits against the entire company. Maybe they didn't feel they could limit the scope in practice, so they just opened it all up.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
We're not wrong, we just "failed to decisively convince this community".
Perhaps instead: we tried to boil the frog too quickly. We'll turn the heat down a bit. This comment is colored by what I think of FaceBook's long term intentions in general.
I will applaud any entity that moves their licensing to a less restrictive model, regardless of their past behavior. Licenses are a royal pain in the ass and often contain hidden gotchas. Any license(looking at you gpl) which offers clear boundaries is a joy to work with.
> short term profit is the most important goal.
That's fun to say, isn't it.
Yet, companies like Facebook, Amazon, etc spend 10 years or more losing money in the expectation that it'll pay off 10 years later. Amazon was founded in 1994 and continued to invest for the future (lose money) until 2013, when it was time to turn a small profit.
Five years after launching Facebook, in 2008, Zuckerberg was asked about plans to make a profit with Facebook one day. He said "in three years or so it'll be time to start thinking about how to monetize it."
YouTube was launched by PayPal employees in 2005 and focused on investing (losing money) in order to get more viewers until 2010, five years.
The actual fact is that Zuckerberg ran Facebook for many years without even thinking about how they'd EVENTUALLY make money long-term, much less focusing on *short-term* profit. Heck, it wasn't until after they'd been running Facebook for 5 years, and had millions of users, that they decided the way they would eventually make profit was by running advertising. Profit simply wasn't something these companies focused on at all.
This will be Facebook's scripting language for highly addictive content.
How non static do you want? Look at Tax N Vote for a dynamic display. Most desktop app do not have 3D.
"we acknowledge that we failed to deceive this community"
The claim was:
> Short term profit is the most important goal.
That's obviously very false. Yes, they did figure they eventually make a profit MANY YEARS LATER. Not this quarter, not next quarter, not next year. So very much the opposite of "short term profit". Rather, they made long term investment.
> it is disingenuous to say people running facebook did not focus on profits for years.
The fact is, they didn't even discuss how they would eventually make revenue for many years. Their FOCUS was on getting more users. Sure they wanted to make money some day, but they didn't do that by focusing on profit; they did that by focusing on users. They figured, correctly, that once they had a hundred million happy users they could figure out profit then - years later. So they focused on the user base, paying no mind to revenue or profit. It worked.
YouTube did the same. That's the correct strategy for a rapidly growing new market - spend the first several years getting bigger, while losing tons of money. Focusing on short-term profit in a rapidly growing new market is how you make $100,000 before shutting down, losing out to the companies who are focused on long term growth and unconcerned with near-term profit.
... for idiot lego brick style web "developers". The whole javascript ecosystem is joke house of cards - a bad initial paradigm, a badly designed language with half assed libraries thrown on top used by bottom of the barrel coders who wouldn't be able to code in C++, java or some other grown up language if their lives depended on it. Yet most of the web now relies on this bloody garbage. How the hell did we get here? I despair.
Who cares? They're all shite for hipsters.
I'm sure Facebook's change of heart has absolutely NOTHING to do with the fact that Matt Mullenweg announced on Thursday that WordPress was going to ditch React as a result of this BSD+Patents crap as he did not feel comfortable pushing that kind of a license onto about a third of all websites.
Anonymous Cowards generally receive no replies because you're a coward and I'm a bitch
we don't want to hold back forward progress for nontechnical reasons," said Facebook engineering director Adam Wolff
Article I, section 8, states, "Congress shall have power... to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
Finally, somebody recognizes that patents and copyright are intended to promote the progress of science and useful arts. Microsoft and Apple still seem to think that these laws are intended to squash the competition.
Mithril.js emphasizes leveraging JavaScript using the HyperScript API (instead of an adhoc templating language) and automatic redrawing when your application changes via user interaction or a network event. This makes web single-page application development quite pleasant to write and maintain and is scalable. You can also test much of such vdom-based UIs without creating real DOM nodes.
https://mithril.js.org/
Check out Tachyons and similar CSS libraries which use CSS classes to essentially define inline styles efficiently and in a maintainable way across big applications. Tachyons works especially well with HyperScript, letting you can do almost all your UI styling in JavaScript.
Here is one example FOSS project I wrote in that style: https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
Of course, few web developers grok this yet because most affirm "best practices" from years ago (e.g. semantic CSS, HTML-first design, JavaScript as a progressive afterthought). Most web developers are used to coding in non-standard HTML-ish templating systems (e.g. Angular, Vue, JSX). This give them a false sense of security they can maintain more complex apps that are mostly about JavaScript. By leveraging JavaScript from the start, Mithril.js may have a slightly higher learning curve (learning more about JavaScript), but it pays off down the road with much more maintainable applications.
React has helped a lot of developers begin to move past some of that, but it has its own baggage (including JSX) from being only half-way to the new paradigm outlined above. MIT licensing improves things, but I still feel Mithril is better for technical reasons. Mithril is simpler internally because Mithril does not emphasize subtree component rendering which React does for "efficiency" but which I'd suggest in practice leads to worse designs and a less understandable core. I also feel HyperScript is a better way to write UIs than JSX by keeping all your code in standard JavaScript/TypeScript without other awkward object constructions. While you can use HyperScript with React via a third-party library, it is a bit klunky as an add on, and most of the React code examples and libraries use JSX.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
From almost two years ago: "Replace React with Mithril for licensing reasons"
https://github.com/Automattic/...
That said, I still feel Mithril.js + Tachyons.css is a better way to develop web apps (see my other comment on this article).
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I thought that the problem with the Facebook BSD+Patent license was that they granted you a patent license, but would revoke it if you sued them for patent infringement (even if completely unrelated to the software in question). This new license doesn't grant any patent license at all, so how is that better?
Next time someone calls me on my bullshit and I lose an argument, I'll try to remember to say, "I acknowledge that I failed to decisively convince you."