Yes, preact looks like a good drop-in replacement. The good thing about the MIT license is you know what you are getting.
I also agree with the OP, even viewing FB in the best light possible, about the best case you can make is that they want to hedge any risks to themselves while profiting from OSS contributions and the OSS marketing. As it stands, there is virtually no case to be made for them wanting to contribute to the OSS community. IMHO if you're a dev and contributing to the facebook oss ecosystem, I would actively encourage you to stop.
Patents protect ideas and inventions. In most cases, patent assertion cases are not black or white — win or loose. Infringement evaluation is complex and costly. A lawsuit can cost hundreds of thousands or millions to file and pursue. You might have a 85% confidence that FB violated a patent of yours, but to even pursue it it’s going to cost you a lot of money.
If on top of that, you will need to invest to migrate away onto a different frontend framework first, and make sure that all your customers are using your new product version (what if you’re using React Native? your users may not upgrade the apps at once!), before you can even file the lawsuit, do you think that’s an honest, ethical usage of open source philosophy?
Bottom line: Open Source is not a “quid pro quo” trade. Open Source is about creating communities to build better software together. It should never be used as a marketplace to exchange people's rights.
Thank you. You pretty eloquently summed up my thoughts about this entire situation. I'm sad, because Facebook runs some pretty cool open source projects. But I will no longer contribute to them if this is their attitude. It's about as far from community-oriented as I can imagine.
FB would be happy to replace the internet with Facebook. I think we've all known this for some time now. It's not their attitude, it's their entire reason for being. It's a form of totalitarianism that we don't have a word for; that's beyond most people's imagination.
It would be fitting for FB to change their motto (?) to "We're not evil either." Lol
It's not what I believe. It's what the "data" shows. Sure you can believe the words. But it's actions that matter. And in that context "don't be evil" is comical at best.
Sorry I've forgotten what the status was on the "are APIs copyrightable" question, i.e. the Oracle v Google fight. I'm kind of confused about what wikipedia says happened - there seem to be two final rulings one in favor of Oracle and one in favor of Google with Oracle appealing the second. Is it that APIs are copyrightable but duplicating them is (sometimes?) covered under fair use? Either way, I'd be a little hesitant to use this.
Oracle really has a way of being a big swinging legal turd, I do believe they would try anything they could. It just seems like they wouldn't wait a year to get it going.
You are correct. (For the unfamiliar, there are separate rulings because in this case, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that APIs are copyrightable, then remanded back to the district court to re-try the case in light of the new decision about copyrightability, which then found that reimplementation of the API was covered under fair use.)
Only in the US. In the EU, in particular, APIs cannot be copyrighted[0].
Namely: "For the avoidance of doubt, it has to be made clear that only the expression of a computer program is protected and that ideas and principles which underlie any element of a program, including those which underlie its interfaces, are not protected by copyright under this Directive."
IANAL, but the problem with MIT is that it doesn't give you anything in relation to patents. I.e. it doesn't even mention them. In this respect, it's no better than React's BSD without patents. I.e. MIT and BSD are quite similar.
The MIT license doesn't mention copyright either, except to state who holds the copyright and forbid you from changing that statement.
The actual permission notice says you have the right to use the software without restriction. To me, a layman, it would seem contradictory and unfair if they later claimed that they held previously unmentioned patents that restricted your use of the software.
It might imply a patent license, it might not. I don't think it's ever been tested in court. But at best you're getting a license to the Preact author's patents, if there are any, which there probably aren't. You're definitely not getting a license to Facebook's patents - but because Preact is a clone of React (in outward design, at least), any Facebook patent that applies to React has a decent chance of also applying to Preact. So I'm not sure it helps that much...
Apologies. I didn't notice this was about preact specifically. I agree that switching to preact is unlikely to help with any patent issues. I don't think any free licenses indemnify you from third-party patent claims.
It's debatable how far that provides indemnity from Facebook. It's explicitly derived from their API, so whereas you can conceivably write a project to make use of React and then seamlessly switch to Preact if Facebook become threatening, surely Preact itself is liable — and your software by extension — for using the API?
you've made a great choice. forget about patents: vue is a joy to use. can't say the same about react, personally.
also check out nuxt.js, a small abstraction layer on top of vue that has some opinions about file structure and also makes SSR a breeze https://nuxtjs.org/
Finishing up a project at work with Vue right now, and I gotta say it's really excellent to work with. Way more intuitive than some other frameworks out there.
To me it has the advantage that jQuery had, the product if a single developer with a huge community behind him but no large company imposing their agenda on the framework.
When most people talk about React, they aren't talking the single library, but rather, the ecosystem of libraries that enable you to build applications. Most "frameworks" are just a collection of libraries too - the difference is in branding, and most frameworks are really just a pre-built package.json/Gemfile/etc.
yes, weex[1], which is becoming some sort of apache project. it was formerly (?) an alibaba project, not actually sure on the specifics RE: changing of hands.
I looked into this because I remembered weex having a different alibaba site[1]. it looks like weex became an ASF incubator project ~6 mos ago. around the same time, evan you (vue creator) mentioned on twitter (or maybe a github comment, I don't remember) that there is massive development going into weex right now. I would guess it'll be a few more months before we see a solid website with solid docs from ASF.
Or there is Google's Polymer framework. In my opinion, Polymer is better than React and Vue. I could never bring myself to use React because of its liense terms.
Using polymer as a JS frontend framework wasted about a year of work at my friend's company. They eventually switched to react for one project and an in-house react replacement for the other.
I'd argue that google is pretty strong when it comes to frameworks, and that most of their criticism comes from people who aren't looking for a framework, but rather a library (like React).
And Polymer isn't even really either of those things, it's a polyfill for a native browser feature.
Polymer is not a polyfill for web components - it is higher level library - something like "jquery for web components" - WC polyfill is separate project, in separate repo - you will need it with X-Tags, Svelte, SkateJS too.
True, what I really love about polymer is https://webcomponents.org, basically a collection of webcomponents that can be used either individually or in combination without much setup.
This creates great looking results pretty fast and also enables you to easily give back to the community by open-sourcing your own components. Last time I checked already 1100 components were listed, of which the vast majority seemed really well build.
That's not correct, the Web Component catalog is completely separate from Polymer. Polymer is a library to make it easier to implement web components. You can use Polymer without using any of the community's components.
From someone who works with Angular everyday, on a multitude of projects... Angular feels far too heavy in comparison to React. While Angular can do the job, there's just too much bloat.
Angular 2+ missed the mark on a few things. Most critically, they missed the mark on Components. Compared to Vue, React, Preact, Marko, etc...Angular 2 components are extremely verbose. And this a big problem, because Components are the building blocks for any UI.
Angular has other issues like the AOT compilation file sizes and the fact that certain standard language features are not supported with it. But even having to know the ins and odds of AOT vs JIT...these aren't even things you have to worry about in any of the ones I mentioned above.
I really wish the Angular team had learned the best lessons from React...but they didn't. It's definitely better than Angular 1...but it's not as good as these other alternatives.
I made the same decision about 1-2 months ago for the same reason, and after scaffolding my project from the CLI, creating some components, and adding additional pieces I needed (vue-router, vuex, dev server proxying to my backend, etc.), Vue has been an absolute pleasure to work with.
It's under MIT license developed by a single person in addition to community's contribution.
This link is rather interesting https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/comparison.html#React