Prediction - there will be a Harvard Business Review about Facebook's adventure with licensing. My unproven hypothesis is that they hurt their software's adoption rate because of their licensing.<p>Personally, I believe MIT is correct. I had moved my company away from React when they had the licensing problems. To me, it feels like they are coming back to the community now.
It's ironic how one can hold utmost respect for Facebook's libraries, but be vehemently against the actual Facebook web application and their business practices.
TL;DR: As far as I can tell, the news here is that Facebook is doing for React Native (& Yoga) what they recently did for React itself. In other words, in the past choosing React for crucial infrastructure put you in position where even if Facebook infringed on your IP, you could not sue them without losing the legal right to use React, potentially crippling your company. So, either use React and create an IP vulnerability with respect to Facebook or don't use React.<p>Facebook changed that licensing policy for React to a more common license. You could now sue Facebook over some IP issue without losing the right to use React. Facebook could still sue you, of course, but so could any other company. Using React no longer increased your vulnerability with respect to IP or lawsuits pertaining to Facebook.<p>But Facebook only removed the (claimed) vulnerability-causing license provision for React, leaving it in place for React Native.<p>And today, they are announcing its removal from React Native as well. Thank you, Facebook.
Neat! Yoga is a great library, I wrote Rust bindings for it:<p><a href="https://github.com/bschwind/yoga-rs?files=1" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bschwind/yoga-rs?files=1</a><p>I eventually want a React Native esque framework but written in Rust instead of JS. Still a ways away though, I don't have much time to work on it.
Does MIT encompass BSD?<p>If it doesn't then surely they can't just re-license code that was contributed by others without their permission.<p>I'm not fundamentally against this and I doubt anyone cares in practice, it just doesn't seem right in terms of the contributor's rights.
Are licenses retroactive? If I used a version of React that was BSD, deployed it into a bundle.js and never touched it again, did I at one point have an agreement with a BSD + Patents, and now an MIT license?
I'm not surprised, React Native doesn't work nearly as well as you'd think. This is basically a piece of software you'd have to give away (IMHO).
osquery was also relicensed (to Apache 2.0 and GPLv2) in <a href="https://github.com/facebook/osquery/pull/4007" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/facebook/osquery/pull/4007</a>.