React Patent Clause Licensing issue. Is it something to worry?

We have collection of more than 1 Million open source products ranging from Enterprise product to small libraries in all platforms. We aggregate information from all open source repositories. Search and find the best for your needs. Check out projects section.

React Patent Clause Licensing issue. Is it something to worry?

We aggregate and tag open source projects. We have collections of more than one million projects. Check out the projects section.

React Licensing issue. Is it something to worry?

React libraries from Facebook is one of the most used UI libraries. It is competitive to AngularJS. There are many open source UI components or frameworks available but mostly people narrow down to two choices Angular / React. Recently Facebook has updated React license and added a patent clause which makes companies to worry and rethink whether to use React or not.

Below is the clause added by Facebook.

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. Notwithstanding the foregoing, if Facebook or any of its
subsidiaries or corporate affiliates files a lawsuit alleging patent
infringement against you in the first instance, and you respond by filing a
patent infringement counterclaim in that lawsuit against that party that is
unrelated to the Software, the license granted hereunder will not terminate
under section (i) of this paragraph due to such counterclaim.

Software patents is one of the most complex and sometimes confusing legal terminology. Facebook recently bought lot of patents worth 500 million dollors from Microsoft and AOL. It is really a big money and they have invested huge amount in patents. Patents are available to the public but its usage is restricted within the company which owns the IP, but Facebook is one of the company which allows users to access and use its patents. React and couple of other open source projects of Facebook is released under BSD + Patents license, which means users are free to access its patents.

We default to using the BSD license when we open source projects. While this is simple and permissive,
we also know that intellectual property is a concern to many developers. So over a year ago, we started
offering an additional grant which provided rights to any Facebook patents relevant to each given project.

Apache software foundation recently declared not to use any of Facebook BSD + Patents license products. Wordpress started a new project Calypso, which rewrites its wordpress from scratch using React. They now considering to move to some other UI library. There are lot of news and conterversies for React and it may disturb React developers.

As said patents and IP are complex to understand and it is double edge sword. Google and Oracle have controversy over Java. In my opinion, Facebook wants to play safe. They added the new clause that, the company or affiliates who sue Facebook for patent infringement will get their React license revoked. If Facebook sues your company for patent infringement and you do counter claim for it then your license will not be revoked. They have explained this in their FAQ.

I don't see any harm of using React and users need not to worry.

Reference:

https://code.facebook.com/pages/850928938376556

https://code.facebook.com/posts/112130496157735/explaining-react-s-license/

https://code.facebook.com/posts/1639473982937255/updating-our-open-source-patent-grant/

https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/PATENTS

Findbestopensource Editorial Team

We publish blog post about open source products. If you are interested in sharing knowledge about open source products, please visit write for us

Subscribe to our newsletter.

We will send mail once in a week about latest updates on open source tools and technologies. subscribe our newsletter

React Media Lightbox

Lightbox is a popular and widely used concept for showing the gallery of media files. It is a very impressive approach for the end user to glance through media files. Media files like audio or video will load the html audio or video controls.

React Window - Optimized way to display large list

In Web development, there will be always a need to display content in a large list. Rendering a large list will slow down the web page load and increase the First Contentful Paint(FCP). Usually large lists are displayed in a paginated grid where user has to move around pages by clicking next. It will be good user experience, if the same page provides data of large list as and when we scroll.

Glific - Open Source Two Way Communication Platform for Social Sector Organizations

Glific is an open source two way communication platform with primary focus on helping social sector organizations to interact with millions of beneficiaries concurrently through automated messages with rich media content and manual intervention wherever required. With Glific one can design flows to automate conversations, see how each of the beneficiaries is interacting with the bot and measure engagement.

Build Consulting Website using Next.js

One of the popular web framework for building Single page application (SPA) or static site is React library. Application built with React packages will be rendered completely on the client side browser. If you want to reduce the load on client side browser, we need to pre-render the pages in server (Serer side rendering) and serve it to the client. So the client loads the page like simple html page. Also if the pages are rendered from server then search engine will be able to fetch and extract the pages. To do SSR for React, the best abstraction framework is Next.js. In this blog, we will explain how to build a simple consulting website using NextJS.

Build Simple Ecommerce site using React and Jotai

Retail Ecommerce website can be created quickly with React. It can be created using React, Bootstrap, React DOM and Jotai. Data flow within the commerce site is done using Jotai in a light-weight manner. The main workflow of showing all the items in the gallery to user and user adding to the cart will be done as part of this blog.

React JS Developer Salary Overview

These days, web development is a need for any business - it attracts huge investments and can kick-start businesses. As for the tools mainly used for development, JavaScript is riding the wave right now. StackOverflow has been naming it the most popular programming language for six years straight. React, as one of the most popular JS libraries is also the first choice for interface developers. It offers some of the best web development tools for mobile and single-page applications.

React Media LightBox - Part 2

In this blog, we will bring the essential features zoom control, download, fullscreen to enhance the view experience of the media items. Lightbox components provide options for captioning the media items as well. Brought all the features only with material design and there are no dependencies required for the functionalities of the media lightbox.

React Reduce Vs Jotai

While developing web applications, we built many components and having a data model across the application wide model will be difficult. We need common store management to update and get information across all the components. In React based Web UI, redux is the official centralized state management to be used which is internally wired as state changes to the component. There are other alternatives to redux which are light-weight and simple to use. One among them is Jotai, a minimalistic API for state management. In this blog we will take one of the redux examples given in the redux site and do the same in Jotai for deeper understanding.

Scene.js - Library to Create Timeline-Based Animation

Scene.js is a JavaScript timeline-based animation library for creating animation websites. As an animated timeline library, it allows you to create a chronological order of movements and positions of objects.

Data Fetching and Form Building using NextJS

Next.js is one of the easy-to-learn frameworks for server-side pre-render pages for client-side web applications. In this blog, we will see how we can fetch data from API and make it pre-render pages. Also, let's see how forms work in Next.js and collect the data without maintaining the database.

JHipster - Generate simple web application code using Spring Boot and Angular

JHipster is one of the full-stack web app development platform to generate, develop and deploy. It provides the front end technologies options of React, Angular, Vue mixed with bootstrap and font awesome icons. Last released version is JHipster 6.0.1. It is licensed under Apache 2 license.

Is it good time to switch from MySQL and choose some other database?

Recently you might have seen many news that big organization like Redhat, Fedora, Wikipedia switched their database from MySQL. Now Google also going to join them. Why everyone want to move out of MySQL? It is once a popular and stable software. What is the reason behind and what are the possible alternatives.

Apache OpenNLP - Document Classification

Apache OpenNLP is a library for natural language processing using machine learning. In this article, we will explore document/text classification by training with sample data and then execute to get its results. We will use plain training model as one example and then training using Navie Bayes Algorithm.

Pros and Cons of GPL licenese

GPL is widely used and known license in Open Source community. Richard Stallman father of GNU is the man behind GPL. GPL gives freedom and not free software.

Why Corporates should contribute to open source?

Open source is leading innovation in all technological areas. Open source awareness has spread around the world. Schools and Colleges students speak about it. Government organization think about it. Corporates relay on open source technological stack to build their enterprise or cloud products.

Desktop Apps using Electron JS with centralized data control

When there is a requirement for having local storage for the desktop application context and data needs to be synchronized to central database, we can think of Electron with PouchDB having CouchDB stack. Electron can be used for cross-platform desktop apps with pouch db as local storage. It can sync those data to centralized database CouchDB seamlessly so any point desktop apps can recover or persist the data. In this article, we will go through of creation of desktop apps with ElectronJS, PouchDB and show the sync happens seamlessly with remote CouchDB.

Appserver.io – The First Multithreaded Application Server for PHP written in PHP

What if you could reliably run PHP without Nginx or Apache, but also without relying on its internal server? What if you could do async operations in PHP with true multi threading, fully taking advantage of multi core processors without hacks or a jungle of callbacks? What if you had drag and drop installation support for your PHAR packaged web apps in an environment identical to its production counterpart? Welcome to appserver.io – the worlds first open source application server for PHP.

Generate PDF from Javascript using jsPDF

We show lot of data in our web applications, it will be awesome if we quickly download specific part of PDF rather than printing it. It will be easy to share for different stakeholders and also for focused meetings. In web application development, download to PDF means, we need to develop backend api specifically and then link it in frontend which takes longer development cylce. Instead it would be really great, if there is way to download what we see in the user interface quickly with few lines of Javascript, similar to export options in word processing application.

Connect to MongoDB and Perform CRUD using Java

MongoDB is a popular and widely used open source NoSQL database. MongoDB is a distributed database at its core, so high availability, horizontal scaling, and geographic distribution is quite possible. It is licensed under Server Side Public License. Recently they moved to Server Side Public License, before that MongoDB was released under AGPL. This article will provide basic example to connect and work with MongoDB using Java.

Holistic usage guide for OpenSSL

OpenSSL is a general purpose cryptographty toolkit that provides an open source implementation of Transport Layer Security(TLS) and Secure Socket Layer(SSL) protocols. It is written in C,assembly and Perl language but wrappers are available in all languages. This article explains about OpenSSL commands.