Is Steemit.com at Risk Due to Using React? WordPress to ditch React library over Facebook patent clause risk

contentjunkie (73)in #steemit • 7 years ago (edited)

From Techcrunch

Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of the popular open source web publishing software WordPress, has said the community will be pulling away from using Facebook’s React JavaScript library over concerns about a patent clause in Facebook’s open source license.
In a blog post explaining the decision yesterday, Mullenweg said he had hoped to officially adopt React for WordPress — noting that Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com which he also founded, had already used React for the Calypso ground-up rewrite of WordPress.com a few years ago, while the WordPress community had started using it for its major Gutenberg core project.

But he said he has changed his mind after seeing Facebook dig in behind the patent clause — which was recently added to the Apache Software Foundation’s (ASF) list of disallowed licenses.

In the ASF’s ‘Category X’ list, where the React patent clause now resides, it writes:

The Facebook BSD+Patents license includes a specification of a PATENTS file that passes along risk to downstream consumers of our software imbalanced in favor of the licensor, not the licensee, thereby violating our Apache legal policy of being a universal donor. The terms of Facebook BSD+Patents license are not a subset of those found in the ALv2, and they cannot be sublicensed as ALv2.

From what I understand Steemit.com is built using the React libraries does this mean there could be some risk of Steemit Inc ceding intellectual property to Facebook by continuing to use their code?