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Comment by stealthefocus | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

If what I gather is correct, the patents in question don't need to be related to React.

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.

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.

But utterly dwarfed by the cost of an offensive patent infringement lawsuit against a $300+ Billion company.

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.

> the cost of rewriting your frontend to not use React is minimal

Or a non-issue if you choose a framework that you feel has safer licensing.

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