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I really have no idea why react is so popular with such a silly license. I agree with this move. There are plenty of OSS projects out there without patent thi

I really have no idea why react is so popular with such a silly license. I agree with this move. There are plenty of OSS projects out there without patent thing attached to its license so no reason to use react.

trumpownsyou 9y ago
react is great. sorry you're a salty bitch.
TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
Considering almost every single large tech company is using React, presumably there's not much reason for concern? IANAL. But you're not wrong, preact is a great alternative to react and it comes with a permissive license.
- ageitgey 9y ago
  Lots of large companies are not using React because of the licence. It's just that companies generally don't talk about legal matters like this openly. So you only hear about who is using it, not who isn't. Often the large companies that are using React have patent cross-licensing agreements with Facebook (or other special arrangements) that make the issue moot for them. Otherwise, getting your in-house council (or even your board, depending on the situation/risk) to approve of using React with the very broad patent restrictions can be an uphill battle indeed.
- reboog711 9y ago
  My most recent 'big' fortune 500 company put me under very strict legal terms regarding what type of software I was allowed to use. Any code I didn't write 100% myself had to be approved by legal before it could be used in software I wrote for them. No, seriously, that is what the contract said. In reality, the bulk of developers used whatever they wanted with no consideration. I assume other contractors were under similar legal terms, but not sure about employees. I was seen as a pain when I kept asking for formal permission for stuff.
  - delhanty 9y ago
    >My most recent 'big' fortune 500 company put me under very strict legal terms regarding what type of software I was allowed to use. Any code I didn't write 100% myself had to be approved by legal before it could be used in software I wrote for them. Back in the day, this was the norm. >In reality, the bulk of developers used whatever they wanted with no consideration. This wasn't - it was grounds for termination. I remember stuff like - (for Windows C++) you can use Microsoft MFC and Microsoft STL - anything else you write from scratch. Legal wasn't very flexible back then.
  - madhadron 9y ago
    If the other developers did so without asking formal permission, then if the company was sued, they'll just pass it on to the developer. The happy medium that I've found is to provide a list of acceptable licenses and let lead engineers audit that software to be included obey them.
    - LoSboccacc 9y ago
      but still many licenses have legal requirements. i.e. I was working at a fortune 50 rare open source project, we had an acceptable license list but still all the source code needed to be audited for dependencies licenses and the legal team produced the license file to be included in distribution with all the notices as required by mit and apache
    - reboog711 9y ago
      I tried very hard to negotiate that happy medium, but was shot down.
- Steeeve 9y ago
  > Considering almost every single large tech company is using React React isn't as popular in the real world as it is on HN.
  - madeofpalk 9y ago
    Well, I guess it depends on what you mean 'almost every single large tech company', but React is used by Facebook (of course), Apple, Twitter, Yahoo, Netflix, Amazon, just to name a few.
    - Steeeve 9y ago
      I would certainly concede that. And I'm not trying to rain on React's parade here. I'm just saying that HN is particularly pro-React as a community.
    - Avshalom 9y ago
      you have only named a few though; 'almost every single large tech company' requires a particular definition of large tech company or a lot more than a few to be a useful(ly true) statement
      - objclxt 9y ago
        Take a look here: https://github.com/facebook/react/wiki/sites-using-react https://github.com/facebook/react/wiki/sites-using-react ...that's obviously not complete, either. If you think of a large tech company the odds are they are using react somewhere for something, be it public facing or internal tooling. Many of the companies that aren't actively using React do so because they have their own JS stacks to dogfood (like Google and Angular).
        chrisco255 9y ago
        Google hardly dogfoods Angular. They use Closure for most of their apps. SPF for YouTube. Polymer in some places. GWT in many others.
    - 9y ago
- nine_k 9y ago
  Some large tech companies may have large coffers of money and other bargaining power, and thus use React. Many don't, and don't. BTW one can use [preact] which is an almost drop-in replacement, but smaller, and is under MIT license. [preact]: https://github.com/developit/preact/ https://github.com/developit/preact/
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- songzme 9y ago
  Thank you for telling us about preact. Is there a good react-native alternative? Our team has bound our codebase pretty tightly to react and react-native (optimized for code sharing).
  - nojvek 9y ago
    Preact compat mode is amazing. Highly recommended.
  - developit 9y ago
    We've begun work on a NativeScript integration that would meet this need. It's early stage though.
- DannyBee 9y ago
  "Considering almost every single large tech company is using React, presumably there's not much reason for concern? IANAL. " Actually, React is banned at a number of them, and i've personally discussed the issue with a number of fairly concerned counsel. So for better or for worse, i don't believe this is as simple as you make it out to be.
  - objclxt 9y ago
    Off the top of my head big users of React include: * Apple (their entire dev docs site is built in it, and they've hosted Bay Area React user meet-ups) * Twitter (for their mobile web) * Microsoft (parts of Visual Studio use it) * Netflix (all over their frontend stack) ...as well as Dropbox, AirBnb, Venmo... So whilst I don't doubt you've discussed it with concerned counsel, there are huge corporations deploying React today, many of whom have extensive experience dealing with patent and IP issues (Apple, Microsoft, etc).
    - jbfr 9y ago
      To add on to this list, even IBM with their large patent portfolio has a large number of teams deploying projects using React and other FB OSS technology. Disclaimer: I work for IBM.
      - jjnoakes 9y ago
        Are those internal projects? Or external?
        jbfr 9y ago
        A good mix of both, surprisingly :) To be concrete, IBM Watson has several products that leverage it that we sell to customers. For example, Watson Company Profiler, Watson Virtual Agent, Watson Discovery-related tools, and more. Other organizations use it as well inside of IBM, like IBM Cloud and IBM Watson IoT, but I'm less familiar with their products off the top of my head.
      - 9y ago
- tomelders 9y ago
  Preact is not an alternative I'd reccomend. It's riddled with very serious bugs. I've found it incredibly difficult to work with.
  - anthonybullard 9y ago
    Could I ask what those bugs we're and if you had filed an issue for them? I don't have any deployed projects based on it, but I've played with it and talked to the main dev a couple of times - he's usually very on top of it.
    - developit 9y ago
      I'd be curious to hear about this too - I don't see any issues filed or commented on by him, perhaps the bugs are more perceptual mismatches with his React experience as opposed to actual bugs. We only recently released preact/debug, which brings with it some of the guardrails React ships by default - maybe without those people run into issues. FWIW there are hundreds of companies (some very very large) using Preact in production. If there were showstopper bugs, they'd be fixed immediately.
      - trueadm 9y ago
        I think this may be referring to "preact-compat" issues rather than Preact issues. I know the Inferno team recently had to change a lot of the state scheduling to be 1:1 with React 15/16 (i.e. batch sync schedule setState after events was very broken and there were issues with controlled components in Safari).
  - jordic 9y ago
    Are we talking about the same? I only use preact because react is so weight for the web :)
  - mosen 9y ago
    https://github.com/developit/preact/issues https://github.com/developit/preact/issues - would you mind logging them as issues?
- dlandis 9y ago
  I believe some of the larger companies negotiate special/alternative licenses with them though.
- Lazare 9y ago
  If you're concerned about React, then Preact is actually significantly worse. Consider: The risk for React is based on 1) speculation that Facebook has patents on core React concepts and 2) the fact that patent grant that comes with React terminates in some situations if you end up in conflict with Facebook. So for safety, it might be better to make sure you use code that Facebook has no patents on, which (if (1) above is true) means "code that is nothing like react at all". A React clone that doesn't have the patent grant at all is vulnerable to all the same issues React itself is, plus more. It's strictly more dangerous than using React itself. (Unless, of course, we assume there's some bit of React that's subject to a Facebook-owned patent that would not also apply to Preact. But having spent a few minutes thinking about it, nothing leaps out at me.)
  - learc83 9y ago
    If Facebook can has patents that cover Preact, they likely cover parts of every JavaScript framework out there. React is a functional component library that uses the virtual DOM. It's well executed, but it's a simple concept.
    - Lazare 9y ago
      Yep. And if Facebook has such patents, I wouldn't be surprised if Google, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. do too. The more you think about the ramifications, the more I come to the conclusion that software patents are an existential threat.
      - kuschku 9y ago
        Tip: move to the EU. The EU does not recognise software patents.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - developit 9y ago
    This is not true, since Preact only implements the same software interface. Its internals are fundamentally different and not a derivative work. Software interfaces cannot be patented - this has been upheld in every court, most recently in Google V Oracle.
- fencepost 9y ago
  I suspect that for a lot of those it's a case of "the development guys want to use this open source library" and nobody in legal has ever been asked. For large companies this is likely an annoyance move, with the argument that nobody who chose to use it is authorized to make that kind of patent - related agreements any more than they're authorized to sell office buildings or manufacturing facilities, but for small tech startups of the sort that Facebook once was this may be a huge hammer.
- ergo14 9y ago
  I dunno "every single large company" seems like an overstatement. Maybe thats the reason some of big enterprises are still on Angular and Polymer - some go for Vue. Some of them also have BSD+Patents but its less broad.
- tjpnz 9y ago
  >Considering almost every single large tech company is using React, How did you arrive at that conclusion?
snarfy 9y ago
Honestly, I didn't read the fine print. I've been having fun playing around with it. I assumed the license was OK considering its popularity.
- kakarot 9y ago
  I'm in the same boat. Hadn't bothered to check out their license yet. Kinda makes me wary about using it for any social platform.
- jasonkostempski 9y ago
  "I assumed the license was OK considering its popularity." I would have too. I'm getting into Clojure(Script) where React(Native) seems to be a popular choice for UI. I haven't touched it yet. I hope there's a good alternative when I get around to it because I really like Clojure but I never wanted to rely on anything made by Facebook.
  - lysium 9y ago
    There is Reacl. https://github.com/active-group/reacl https://github.com/active-group/reacl
    - jasonkostempski 9y ago
      Doesn't that still require React under the hood? It's the licensing that's a concern to me, not the code/interface itself.
- pmlnr 9y ago
  "I assumed the license was OK considering its popularity." Always check the licence. Public domain, MIT, simple, plain BSD, GPL (any version), apache - if it's anything else, be extremely cautious.
  - Hasknewbie 9y ago
    If it's anything else, I would say start by checking the Open Source Initiative Web site: https://opensource.org/licenses https://opensource.org/licenses
Waterluvian 9y ago
I'm bewildered by the number of individuals who are stating surprise at how/why people use react despite it's license. It feels like a very out of touch perspective. What % of React users read licenses or need to care about licenses?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ballenf 9y ago
It's very, very hard to give up immediate advantage+ in return for reducing a nebulous risk very far in the future. + (not saying React is objectively better than alternatives, only that if you believe it's better then the statement is true for you)
RaleyField 9y ago
> use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted You are licensed to use React even if you never agreed to whatever is in the PATENTS file. The reading where to use a source code is meant only to compile it, maybe admire the compiled artifact but never to put it anywhere near an executable environment seems pretty far-fetched to me.

trumpownsyou 9y ago

react is great. sorry you're a salty bitch.

TheAceOfHearts 9y ago

Considering almost every single large tech company is using React, presumably there's not much reason for concern? IANAL. But you're not wrong, preact is a great alternative to react and it comes with a permissive license.

ageitgey 9y ago
Lots of large companies are not using React because of the licence. It's just that companies generally don't talk about legal matters like this openly. So you only hear about who is using it, not who isn't. Often the large companies that are using React have patent cross-licensing agreements with Facebook (or other special arrangements) that make the issue moot for them. Otherwise, getting your in-house council (or even your board, depending on the situation/risk) to approve of using React with the very broad patent restrictions can be an uphill battle indeed.
reboog711 9y ago
My most recent 'big' fortune 500 company put me under very strict legal terms regarding what type of software I was allowed to use. Any code I didn't write 100% myself had to be approved by legal before it could be used in software I wrote for them. No, seriously, that is what the contract said. In reality, the bulk of developers used whatever they wanted with no consideration. I assume other contractors were under similar legal terms, but not sure about employees. I was seen as a pain when I kept asking for formal permission for stuff.
- delhanty 9y ago
  >My most recent 'big' fortune 500 company put me under very strict legal terms regarding what type of software I was allowed to use. Any code I didn't write 100% myself had to be approved by legal before it could be used in software I wrote for them. Back in the day, this was the norm. >In reality, the bulk of developers used whatever they wanted with no consideration. This wasn't - it was grounds for termination. I remember stuff like - (for Windows C++) you can use Microsoft MFC and Microsoft STL - anything else you write from scratch. Legal wasn't very flexible back then.
- madhadron 9y ago
  If the other developers did so without asking formal permission, then if the company was sued, they'll just pass it on to the developer. The happy medium that I've found is to provide a list of acceptable licenses and let lead engineers audit that software to be included obey them.
  - LoSboccacc 9y ago
    but still many licenses have legal requirements. i.e. I was working at a fortune 50 rare open source project, we had an acceptable license list but still all the source code needed to be audited for dependencies licenses and the legal team produced the license file to be included in distribution with all the notices as required by mit and apache
  - reboog711 9y ago
    I tried very hard to negotiate that happy medium, but was shot down.
Steeeve 9y ago
> Considering almost every single large tech company is using React React isn't as popular in the real world as it is on HN.
- madeofpalk 9y ago
  Well, I guess it depends on what you mean 'almost every single large tech company', but React is used by Facebook (of course), Apple, Twitter, Yahoo, Netflix, Amazon, just to name a few.
  - Steeeve 9y ago
    I would certainly concede that. And I'm not trying to rain on React's parade here. I'm just saying that HN is particularly pro-React as a community.
  - Avshalom 9y ago
    you have only named a few though; 'almost every single large tech company' requires a particular definition of large tech company or a lot more than a few to be a useful(ly true) statement
    - objclxt 9y ago
      Take a look here: https://github.com/facebook/react/wiki/sites-using-react https://github.com/facebook/react/wiki/sites-using-react ...that's obviously not complete, either. If you think of a large tech company the odds are they are using react somewhere for something, be it public facing or internal tooling. Many of the companies that aren't actively using React do so because they have their own JS stacks to dogfood (like Google and Angular).
      - chrisco255 9y ago
        Google hardly dogfoods Angular. They use Closure for most of their apps. SPF for YouTube. Polymer in some places. GWT in many others.
  - 9y ago
nine_k 9y ago
Some large tech companies may have large coffers of money and other bargaining power, and thus use React. Many don't, and don't. BTW one can use [preact] which is an almost drop-in replacement, but smaller, and is under MIT license. [preact]: https://github.com/developit/preact/ https://github.com/developit/preact/
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
songzme 9y ago
Thank you for telling us about preact. Is there a good react-native alternative? Our team has bound our codebase pretty tightly to react and react-native (optimized for code sharing).
- nojvek 9y ago
  Preact compat mode is amazing. Highly recommended.
- developit 9y ago
  We've begun work on a NativeScript integration that would meet this need. It's early stage though.
DannyBee 9y ago
"Considering almost every single large tech company is using React, presumably there's not much reason for concern? IANAL. " Actually, React is banned at a number of them, and i've personally discussed the issue with a number of fairly concerned counsel. So for better or for worse, i don't believe this is as simple as you make it out to be.
- objclxt 9y ago
  Off the top of my head big users of React include: * Apple (their entire dev docs site is built in it, and they've hosted Bay Area React user meet-ups) * Twitter (for their mobile web) * Microsoft (parts of Visual Studio use it) * Netflix (all over their frontend stack) ...as well as Dropbox, AirBnb, Venmo... So whilst I don't doubt you've discussed it with concerned counsel, there are huge corporations deploying React today, many of whom have extensive experience dealing with patent and IP issues (Apple, Microsoft, etc).
  - jbfr 9y ago
    To add on to this list, even IBM with their large patent portfolio has a large number of teams deploying projects using React and other FB OSS technology. Disclaimer: I work for IBM.
    - jjnoakes 9y ago
      Are those internal projects? Or external?
      - jbfr 9y ago
        A good mix of both, surprisingly :) To be concrete, IBM Watson has several products that leverage it that we sell to customers. For example, Watson Company Profiler, Watson Virtual Agent, Watson Discovery-related tools, and more. Other organizations use it as well inside of IBM, like IBM Cloud and IBM Watson IoT, but I'm less familiar with their products off the top of my head.
    - 9y ago
tomelders 9y ago
Preact is not an alternative I'd reccomend. It's riddled with very serious bugs. I've found it incredibly difficult to work with.
- anthonybullard 9y ago
  Could I ask what those bugs we're and if you had filed an issue for them? I don't have any deployed projects based on it, but I've played with it and talked to the main dev a couple of times - he's usually very on top of it.
  - developit 9y ago
    I'd be curious to hear about this too - I don't see any issues filed or commented on by him, perhaps the bugs are more perceptual mismatches with his React experience as opposed to actual bugs. We only recently released preact/debug, which brings with it some of the guardrails React ships by default - maybe without those people run into issues. FWIW there are hundreds of companies (some very very large) using Preact in production. If there were showstopper bugs, they'd be fixed immediately.
    - trueadm 9y ago
      I think this may be referring to "preact-compat" issues rather than Preact issues. I know the Inferno team recently had to change a lot of the state scheduling to be 1:1 with React 15/16 (i.e. batch sync schedule setState after events was very broken and there were issues with controlled components in Safari).
- jordic 9y ago
  Are we talking about the same? I only use preact because react is so weight for the web :)
- mosen 9y ago
  https://github.com/developit/preact/issues https://github.com/developit/preact/issues - would you mind logging them as issues?
dlandis 9y ago
I believe some of the larger companies negotiate special/alternative licenses with them though.
Lazare 9y ago
If you're concerned about React, then Preact is actually significantly worse. Consider: The risk for React is based on 1) speculation that Facebook has patents on core React concepts and 2) the fact that patent grant that comes with React terminates in some situations if you end up in conflict with Facebook. So for safety, it might be better to make sure you use code that Facebook has no patents on, which (if (1) above is true) means "code that is nothing like react at all". A React clone that doesn't have the patent grant at all is vulnerable to all the same issues React itself is, plus more. It's strictly more dangerous than using React itself. (Unless, of course, we assume there's some bit of React that's subject to a Facebook-owned patent that would not also apply to Preact. But having spent a few minutes thinking about it, nothing leaps out at me.)
- learc83 9y ago
  If Facebook can has patents that cover Preact, they likely cover parts of every JavaScript framework out there. React is a functional component library that uses the virtual DOM. It's well executed, but it's a simple concept.
  - Lazare 9y ago
    Yep. And if Facebook has such patents, I wouldn't be surprised if Google, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. do too. The more you think about the ramifications, the more I come to the conclusion that software patents are an existential threat.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      Tip: move to the EU. The EU does not recognise software patents.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- developit 9y ago
  This is not true, since Preact only implements the same software interface. Its internals are fundamentally different and not a derivative work. Software interfaces cannot be patented - this has been upheld in every court, most recently in Google V Oracle.
fencepost 9y ago
I suspect that for a lot of those it's a case of "the development guys want to use this open source library" and nobody in legal has ever been asked. For large companies this is likely an annoyance move, with the argument that nobody who chose to use it is authorized to make that kind of patent - related agreements any more than they're authorized to sell office buildings or manufacturing facilities, but for small tech startups of the sort that Facebook once was this may be a huge hammer.
ergo14 9y ago
I dunno "every single large company" seems like an overstatement. Maybe thats the reason some of big enterprises are still on Angular and Polymer - some go for Vue. Some of them also have BSD+Patents but its less broad.
tjpnz 9y ago
>Considering almost every single large tech company is using React, How did you arrive at that conclusion?

snarfy 9y ago

Honestly, I didn't read the fine print. I've been having fun playing around with it. I assumed the license was OK considering its popularity.

kakarot 9y ago
I'm in the same boat. Hadn't bothered to check out their license yet. Kinda makes me wary about using it for any social platform.
jasonkostempski 9y ago
"I assumed the license was OK considering its popularity." I would have too. I'm getting into Clojure(Script) where React(Native) seems to be a popular choice for UI. I haven't touched it yet. I hope there's a good alternative when I get around to it because I really like Clojure but I never wanted to rely on anything made by Facebook.
- lysium 9y ago
  There is Reacl. https://github.com/active-group/reacl https://github.com/active-group/reacl
  - jasonkostempski 9y ago
    Doesn't that still require React under the hood? It's the licensing that's a concern to me, not the code/interface itself.
pmlnr 9y ago
"I assumed the license was OK considering its popularity." Always check the licence. Public domain, MIT, simple, plain BSD, GPL (any version), apache - if it's anything else, be extremely cautious.
- Hasknewbie 9y ago
  If it's anything else, I would say start by checking the Open Source Initiative Web site: https://opensource.org/licenses https://opensource.org/licenses

Waterluvian 9y ago

I'm bewildered by the number of individuals who are stating surprise at how/why people use react despite it's license. It feels like a very out of touch perspective. What % of React users read licenses or need to care about licenses?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ballenf 9y ago

It's very, very hard to give up immediate advantage+ in return for reducing a nebulous risk very far in the future. + (not saying React is objectively better than alternatives, only that if you believe it's better then the statement is true for you)

RaleyField 9y ago

> use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted You are licensed to use React even if you never agreed to whatever is in the PATENTS file. The reading where to use a source code is meant only to compile it, maybe admire the compiled artifact but never to put it anywhere near an executable environment seems pretty far-fetched to me.