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Comment by patrickaljord | Hacker News Reader

Here's a list of companies using React:

- Microsoft - Uber - Yahoo Mail - Dropbox - Airbnb - Netflix - NY Times

If they're ok with the license, you probably shouldn't worry too much. Basically, if you don't own any patents or if your company is smaller than any of the above, you should be ok.

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You don't know that they weren't granted separate licensing deals.

I assume they were.

This license is likely to protect facebook against patent litigation that a startup might claim facebook is in violation of.

It's not too hard to imagine a scenario where the next snapchat-like-startup is using react native. Facebook is then in a super leveraged position against them legally.

Snap stories are now facebook stories, instagram stories, and whatsapp stories. It's not such a big leap that it'll happen again.

No, if such a startup sued FB, then would end up being a legal user of React under the BSD license, which does not terminate.

A more likely explanation is that these large orgs employ real lawyers who looked at the licence and grant and who then approved the use of react because they are professional lawyers who actually understand the legalities involved, unlike 99% of the commenters in this thread.

What's not to understand? If Facebook infringes on one of your software patents your choices are to rewrite your existing React code and sue them for damages or ignore it.

Once your 'professional lawyer' agrees that the license is enforceable it's up to you to decide whether giving Facebook an effective grant of all your patents it worth it.

> rewrite your existing React code

my understanding is that this isn't the case - react isn't itself covered by patent, and the bsd license remains in effect.

I suspect the real reason is that these large companies already have large patent war chests, so any suit from FB could incite countersuits from them. They have a measure of impunity and thus their exposure to risk is much less than that of smaller companies and startups.

This is a very dangerous follower mentality. You and I are not in the league of these big companies. If FB sues them they have deep enough pockets to fight back. But we, we would just vanish into thin air.

If you develop a patent worth a billion dollar that Facebook wants to steal, you will probably be ok too.

"worth billion dollars" is not the same as "have billion dollars". FB is both worth and have multiple billion dollars. Does this make sense to you?

All these companies are big enough to potentially have a separate patent agreement with Facebook. I don't have any insider knowledge about them (or anyone else, for that matter) to say whether they do, but you should entertain the possibility rather than assuming their risks are greater than yours.

The person in question was talking out of school, and so I have to be very vague (and you can take this for what it's worth because of it, you don't have to believe me), but at least one of those companies listed in the prior post has no such agreement with Facebook.

Source for Microsoft? I once read an article saying that Google, Apple & Microsoft forbade all their developers from even using React due to its licence and this was years ago.

Come on, everybody's doing it...

Anyway, it's not up to me, it's up to the legal team and they are saying "No".

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