React (software): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 08:08, 13 October 2018

Revision as of 08:08, 13 October 2018

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<blockquote>''"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, (ii) against any party if such Patent Assertion arises in whole or in part from any software, technology, product or service of Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or corporate affiliates, or (iii) against any party relating to the Software. [...] 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."<ref>{{cite web|title=Additional Grant of Patent Rights Version 2|url=https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/b8ba8c83f318b84e42933f6928f231dc0918f864/PATENTS|website=GitHub}}</ref>''</blockquote>

The [[Apache Software Foundation]] considered this licensing arrangement to be incompatible with its licensing policies, as it "passes along risk to downstream consumers of our software imbalanced in favor of the licensor, not the licensee, thereby violating our Apache legal policy of being a universal donor", and "are not a subset of those found in the [Apache License 2.0], and they cannot be sublicensed as [Apache License 2.0].".<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html|title=ASF Legal Previously Asked Questions|publisher=Apache Software Foundation|language=en|access-date=2017-07-16}}</ref>. In August 2017, Facebook dismissed the Apache Foundation's downstream concerns and refused to reconsider their license<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://code.facebook.com/posts/112130496157735/explaining-react-s-license/|title=Explaining React's License|website=Facebook|access-date=2017-08-18|language=en}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/10191#issuecomment-323486580|title=Consider re-licensing to AL v2.0, as RocksDB has just done|website=Github|language=en|access-date=2017-08-18}}</ref>. The following month, [[WordPress]] decided to switch their Gutenberg and Calypso projects away from React.<ref>{{Cite web|url= https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/15/wordpress-to-ditch-react-library-over-facebook-patent-clause-risk/|title= WordPress to ditch React library over Facebook patent clause risk |website=TechCrunch|language=en|access-date=2017-09-16}}</ref>

On September 23, 2017, Facebook announced that the following week, it would re-license Flow, Jest, React, and Immutable.js under a standard [[MIT License]]; the company stated that React was "the foundation of a broad ecosystem of open source software for the web", and that they did not want to "hold back forward progress for nontechnical reasons."<ref>{{Cite web|url= https://code.facebook.com/posts/300798627056246/relicensing-react-jest-flow-and-immutable-js/|title= Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js |website=Facebook Code|language=en|date=2017-09-23}}</ref>