Facebook license questioned by open-source community

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Facebook, the social media website and web developing giant, has admitted that it failed to convince other coders to follow its philosophy, and will re-license some of its widely-used web tools under a patent-free license.

The re-licensing came after a month-long debate between Facebook and the open-source community, a large number of coders that love to share their work with the rest of the world.

The license

The PATENT file, shipped with Facebook's React web tool. /Github Screenshot‍

Facebook developed some of the most applied web tools, including React, which is used in the websites of Alipay, BBC, Dailymotion, eBay and many others.

But the license for those tools comes with a patent grant, which basically restricts users from suing Facebook for patent infringement.

The debate on the Facebook license has been lasting for years, before the company modified it again last month, which a lot of coders saw as unacceptable.

"If Facebook copies your business model, you can't sue them because of the new patent restriction. So don't use React on your projects anymore," an editor nicknamed "Spectrum" wrote on a Chinese tech blog PINGWEST.

The editor added that Chinese Internet giants Baidu and Alibaba has already ditched React from their web tools.

Reactions from open-source community

Weeks after Facebook made the patent change, developer of the world most-used web server software, Apache, announced that the "Facebook BSD + Patents" license had been blocked by the foundation.

Another heavy blow was dealt by WordPress, the blog software that powers one-fourth of the world's websites.

One of its maker Matt Mullenweg wrote a blog post on September 14 to announce that he'd rather rewrite some core parts of WordPress than accepting the Facebook license.

Mullenweg's blog post. /ma.tt Screenshot

"We had a many-thousand word announcement talking about how great React is...That post won't be published," read the post.

There are also coders that see the matter small.

"Just ditch React and switch to another tool, like Vue. There are a lot of tools that can do exactly the same thing," a person nicknamed "Sapp" commented on Chinese developer forum V2EX.

A matter of trust

But Facebook didn't turn its head back. Instead it posted a FAQ telling developers that the patent change was only a defensive action against patent trolls, which led to further debate about the company's morality.

Facebook's explanation on the license issue. /Facebook Screenshot

"I understand that Facebook wants both 'open-source' title and the profit, but it's just not that possible," a zhihu.com writer "winter" said on the website. The person has more than 100,000 followers.

With all that said, Facebook has now returned to a standard MIT license widely used in open-source software. The farce seems to have ended. But the re-licensing only effect exactly four tools: React, Jest, Flow and Immutable, as Facebook announced.

"It's not just about React. There are nearly a hundred tools licensed this way and Facebook is not changing it," a person claimed to be Baidu's front-end engineer said on zhihu.com, adding that he / she was "bruised and battered" by Baidu's decision to pull React from the company.

"How can we trust Facebook as a credible open-source developer anymore?" the person added.