Do people really think Facebook developed and released React for the sole, or even primary purpose of gaining patent rights? It's preposterous that so many top engineers would be working on such a goal.
It seems obvious that Facebook just has some overly cautious lawyers. I highly doubt that means Facebook is going to use your usage of React as an excuse to steal your patents.
"Do people really think Facebook developed and released React for the sole, or even primary purpose of gaining patent rights? It's preposterous that so many top engineers would be working on such a goal.
"
Having met with their legal and open source departments and talked about this before, i can pretty much say "they have a reasonable set of problems, and are trying to do a reasonable set of things about it".
One can argue they don't need to be this harsh about it, etc.
But that's about risk tolerance, not about trying to gain more rights.
Perhaps. But what if Oracle buys facebook or Zuckerberg steps down and a litigious CEO takes over. This is a major concern for lawyers in large companies.
I'm happy to recommend that everyone stop using React if Facebook ever sues someone for using React. But it remains a very unlikely possibility, especially since we don't even know if Facebook has React patents.
Right. After you've spent 10+ man/years developing an app based on React / other lib with similar restriction. "stop using React" is fine advise for small projects that can be rewritten in few months by few people. For very large projects the cost of stop using / rewrite could be huge.
Exactly. If you're actually in a legal dispute with Facebook, the cost of rewriting your frontend to not use React is minimal.
It's not like React is a massive library with a huge surface area. Even a fairly complex application could be migrated to an alternative like Vue.js if the need arose.
Yes they do, because that's the only patent rights this license is granting to you. All that happens if you sue Facebook for patent infringement is that you lose the patent license included with React—since unrelated patents were never included in that in the first place, it makes no difference if it's terminated.
Do people really think Facebook developed and released React for the sole, or even primary purpose of gaining patent rights? It's preposterous that so many top engineers would be working on such a goal.
It seems obvious that Facebook just has some overly cautious lawyers. I highly doubt that means Facebook is going to use your usage of React as an excuse to steal your patents.