ReactJs Licensing
There is a strong wipe going in the Front-end market regarding ReactJS Openness. Just to tell others who are not aware of this cold wave that “Facebook has moved out maximum of their products from Open source community, i.e React and other Facebook work will no longer be termed as Open Source. For the sake of simplicity and easy reading I am putting the summary of current changes in question-answer format. My Intent here is to make you aware of the current changes so that you can act before time. Please don’t consider me as anti-React for writing this mail, in past, i have evaluated and suggested React to multiple projects (based on their business needs).
Let’s start reading about the change now.
What is the new license status of ReactJs?
BSD + patents license
What is this ReactJs new license is all about?
“BSD + patents” essentially means that the code is open (for everyone to see and use), but it’s copyrighted by Facebook. The BSD license grants you a copyright usage license. Additionally, they grant you a patent license as long as you’re nice to them by never suing Facebook for patent infringement.
Not able to understand it clearly, why are we speaking about “Suing” and “Nice” to Facebook
In Simple words, If you use React, you cannot go against Facebook for any patent they hold.
Got it, but can you give more details, an example could be helpful here?
Let me take one example here, you’re developing an application for Microwave. who markets intelligent Microwave. Behind the scene you use React for the UI. After some time, you hear that Facebook decides to move into the Microwave industry, and they’ve announced the worldwide launch of their new product: “FBMicrowave”.
Now the big dilemma comes, you cannot sue FaceBook immediately because You’re using React on the customer-facing app, correct?
If you sue them before migrating to something else (like Angular.js), you will immediately lose the patent grant for React, and suddenly you’re in breach yourself, fighting against a potential lawsuit for illegal use of software, from an almost-$500-billion company, all by yourself.
Why Facebook doing this, what benefit it will bring to Facebook by moving to new License for ReactJs?
As per Facebook “Facebook receives a large number of meritless patent claims. They waste lots of resources fighting them. So they decided to capitalize on the success of their Open Source projects (like React) to introduce a Trojan horse to deter users from filing — theoretically meritless — patent claims against them. They do not reciprocate this restriction.”
Who all will be impacted by this change?
All who are using React in their projects.
What should I do now, As an Architect I have chosen ReactJs for my next Project or what will be the future of ReactJS going on?
Wait!, Analyze again, speak to project leaders and make them aware of the latest developments happening around React community, if you found your client and other stakeholders are ok with latest licensing terms then keep rolling up with ReactJs.
For new projects who are about to start or still analyzing framework/libraries around frontend ecosystem, I think they should wait and watch for some more time, it’s good to see how community is reacting against this change because in past we have seen similar kind of community shift (Adobe Flex to HTML5) which brings whole new dimensions to our world.
Reference taken from:
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