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Comment by outside1234 | Hacker News Reader

Are there plans to relicense React Native to MIT without a Patent timebomb as well?

It's possible in the future, but re-licensing React itself was already a very large change, and it will take more time to review the possibility of this for other projects like RN. Thanks for your patience!

Yeah, pity said large change was implemented before checking if it was a good idea.

Community: This license is a legal nightmare. Something needs doing! Facebook: We have done something. Community: Try listening to both sentences next time.

The MIT license is extremely commonplace in web libraries and is well accepted. (used by jQuery, Preact, Angular, etc.)

Can you clarify your concerns?

I'm not in anyway connected with FB, but I think the reason why React was licensed under MIT more quickly than React Native is because of that licensing environment. Web frameworks traditionally have very open licenses, but native seems more more restricted such as with Qt and the C# thing I don't remember the name of.

Except the largest 3rd party Objective-C and Java (Android) libraries are usually MIT as well. I don't really think this has to do with traditions as far as per platform licensing goes.

C# things : xamarin & mono

But does MIT license really solve all patent issues? FB could still enforce patents regardless of license if I understood it properly.

IANAL, but is it fair to say that using React under MIT doesn't leave you any worse off than using Angular and Vue? (both of which are MIT-licensed)

Depending on the patent in question, it is possible to be on the hook even if you don't use React.

But do the others have explicit patents?

Does React?

I don't know. But Facebook owns around 5200 patents. Add the previous patent clause to it and you have a good probability that there are patents covering parts of react. VirtualDOM is certainly a candidate.

Everyone can, that's precisely why they gave you a grant previously. Now that it's gone due to the outcry it's in the same, vague playing field that all other libraries are in. Every project you have ever written infringes on someones IP. The only thing that matters is that lawyers that previously got cold feet can now relax. We had a project for instance that was canceled, now it's being green-lit thanks to the MIT license.

Actually, there is an (albeit so far untested) implicit patent grant in all-permissive licenses like the MIT. So removing the explicit one-way, revokable patent grant actually implicitly provides a better patent grant.

I'd really like to see that written black on white,though.

The fact that MIT and BSD licensed code (implicit patent impunity) can be re-licensed under the Apache license (explicit patent impunity) is enough evidence for me.

Reference: http://apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-a

What does re-licensed mean? You can’t take mit licensed code and slap a Apache License on it.

You can create a derivative work and license that under Apache.

Not if it uses copyrighted MIT licensed code.

Black and white is not as good as everyone seems to think. There are reasons you don't enumerate every possibility ;) (courts will then interpret that as a complete list, instead of extending it to cover similar situations)

If you had black and white fair use, for example, you'd just be railing against the fact that courts wouldn't extend it to cover new similar thing X.

Black and white is good for establishing baselines in law (IE "these things over here are definitely okay, and everything else should be judged by these factors" It's rarely that great if you are trying to make a license that stands the test of time and march of technology.

react isn't covered by fb patent, so using react grants nothing in terms of fb patents (implied or otherwise).

This is not untested, only untested in the software field. It's very very very well tested in other fields.

So far, every court ever (and there are quite a lot of them) has said "when you tell people they can use your thing and do what they want with it, you can't sue them later for infringement for doing what you said was okay".

There is pretty much zero precedent on the other side.

In fact, one of the only related pieces of precedent on the other side, which was "attempting to avoid patent exhaustion by contract" was completely and totally overruled by the supreme court last year, where they unequivocably said that sales exhaust patents, no matter what you make a person agree to.

> But does MIT license really solve all patent issues?

Close enough, I'd say.

> FB could still enforce patents regardless of license

It is widely accepted that the MIT license has an implicit patent grant.

My understanding this was already done last week. I could be wrong. GraphQL however, not yet.

Not React Native, that still has the patent clause.

GraphQL specification has been relicensed minutes ago to Open Web Foundation Agreement, graphql-js and relay to MIT.

https://medium.com/@leeb/relicensing-the-graphql-specificati...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15340528

But now they "have" to relicense React Native, right? Otherwise someone will write a React Native clone starting from MIT-licensed React, no?

I suppose they might, and good luck to them. React Native is a monstrously complex beast in comparison to React.

Ultimately the React ecosystem would benefit from the attempt.

[edited]

React !== React Native

Well, react-dom !== react-native. Both projects use core react.

However React == React Native evals as true due to type conversion (in ECMAScript projects with or without a patent grant are both considered 'truthy'). Really even === is not good enough, The only reliably why to test for it right now is to put a patent claim against FB inside a try-catch.

* I am not a lawyer and this should not be taken as legal advice.

Here's the problem with that type of snark; when you're wrong it's really bad for you. You are responding to a question about react NATIVE, which still has the patent grenade (see below).

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

What patents does react native utilize of facebook’s?

Not sure, but that's not relevant to the patent grenade. It revokes your license if you're involved in ANY patent action against Facebook, regardless of that patent being used in RN or not.

It does not revoke your license to use RN if you sue Facebook.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com