Startups should not use React
Fine. That you still don&#x27;t address my main concern (i.e. that the premise of the article is clickbait and your entire argument about open source purity is orthogonal to it) tells me everything I needed to know.<p>&gt; Patent grants are good.<p>So you&#x27;re not upset with Facebook providing a patent grant but with the terms of that patent grant, fair enough.<p>&gt; Facebook could’ve done the same<p>The projects using this patent grant are almost 100% sponsored by Facebook. They&#x27;re not tied to any particular ecosystem or using Facebook services. If Facebook makes the use of the relevant patents contingent on you not suing them, I&#x27;m having a hard time feeling upset about it.<p>Yes, this isn&#x27;t as permissive as Apache2 but &quot;you get to use all my stuff as long as you don&#x27;t sue me for stealing your ideas&quot; sounds fairly benign.<p>&gt; If it were true, companies should be running towards this license model.<p>This is literally an argument from popularity. Despite all appearances, IT can be mindnumbingly slow to adopt new ideas, especially ones involving politics. Most people don&#x27;t care about patents -- heck, as can be seen from 90% of the people commenting on React&#x27;s patent grant, most people don&#x27;t <i>understand</i> patents.<p>In the JS ecosystem MIT and BSD are among the most popular licenses. The reason they&#x27;re popular is that they&#x27;re short and don&#x27;t contain much legalese. Does that make them good licenses? Hell no, but it makes them appear easy to understand and simple. Adding a patent grant to that makes it &quot;not simple&quot;. It&#x27;s also something you have to do intentionally.<p>But that&#x27;s beside the point. Let&#x27;s just assume Facebook is wrong and having this be the standard wouldn&#x27;t bring about world peace and the death of patents or what have you. Let&#x27;s go with that. How does your assessment that this is evil and bad follow from that?<p>&gt; Well, yes. They are conjecture.<p>Thank you. Then stop wrapping them as quality advice to trick people into reading your opinion.<p>&gt; Please stop making camps in your head. There is no React vs. ASF conspiracy nor battle taking place.<p>You tried to dismiss my opinion by portraying me as a React fanboy. I pointed out why that is bullshit and you&#x27;re throwing bricks in a glass house. Now you&#x27;re accusing me of being the one who tries to make this about camps?<p>&gt; Startups don’t tend to enjoy that amount of manpower; I have already answered this several times.<p>Your entire point is that startups shouldn&#x27;t use React <i>because bigcos might acquire them</i>. Now you&#x27;re literally arguing that bigcos don&#x27;t have to worry about migrating away from React. Doesn&#x27;t that seem entirely contradictory?<p>Sure, you could argue that bigcos will still factor in this cost into acquisitions but if they already pay that cost for their own projects it can&#x27;t be so prohibitive to result in bad deals. And how do you rationalise Microsoft actively encouraging <i>outside developers</i> to use React to build on their platform? Surely this would make any resulting acquisition unnecessarily costly.<p>&gt; Hence, what is left? Trust that FB won’t go after you?<p>Are you worried Facebook will go after you? Are you worried Google will go after you? Are you worried Apple will go after you? Software patents are already a minefield. You&#x27;re far more likely to be sued by a non-operating entity.<p>A patent lawsuit can easily kill almost any startup. You seem to be obsessing over how many nukes you&#x27;re going to be hit with while operating at a scale where being caught in the blast radius of even a single one would end you.<p>Oh, wait, this is completely irrelevant. The patent grant does not terminate when you get sued. It doesn&#x27;t even terminate if you countersue. The patent grant ONLY terminates if you proactively sue Facebook or sue (or countersue) any user of React <i>over</i> React (including Facebook). If Facebook sues you and you countersue Facebook over your smart fridge patent, you still get to use React.<p>&gt; but my time is finite<p>So is mine. But protecting people from unsubstantiated FUD is worth it.<p>&gt; you will find that OSS developers who are affiliated to some Foundation (Mozilla, Apache, Eclipse, etc.) tend to be versed in licensing, without needing to be lawyers<p>Good, as every developer should be. But if your mischaracterization of how the patent grant can terminate isn&#x27;t based on a lack of comprehension or absentmindedness, what am I to read into that?<p>PS: I meant what I said. You should have written an article entirely about the issues you have with the BSD+Patents issue from an aspect of open source purity. Without the conjecture and clickbait angle to it. I would have read that, too. I would probably have disagreed with some of it even if I would have upvoted it. But at least it would have provided the grounds for an honest discussion.<p>The argument is valid to be had. There&#x27;s no point to dressing it up as if it were about startups.<p>You&#x27;re not an idiot. You know very well that your article won&#x27;t convince startup developers to drop React, it will only influence non-technical people who are risk-averse and see your headline without understanding any of it.<p>Instead of playing this game and claiming you &quot;don&#x27;t want to start a flame war&quot; after writing an obviously inflammatory article, please salvage those ideas you buried in it and write that article properly.