Facebook is going to relicense React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js under MIT licence. This is being done because Some days ago, React licensing was changed to BSD + Patent license. After that Apache software Foundation marked it under Category-X licence. That means that React would not be allowed for Apache.org projects.
Now, facebook is decided to relicense it under MIT license. Explaining this Facebook’s engineering director Adam Wolff wrote a blog post. He also backed facebook decision to move react under BSD + Patents license.
This decision comes after several weeks of disappointment and uncertainty for our community. Although we still believe our BSD + Patents license provides some benefits to users of our projects, we acknowledge that we failed to decisively convince this community.
After their decision to move React under BSD + Patents licence, Automattic (The company behind wordpress) announced that they will no more use React for their Gutenberg project. Wolff also left a message to all of them who has left the React bind and searching for new libraries. He wrote that, they wanted to leave the door open for open source community.
In the wake of uncertainty about our license, we know that many teams went through the process of selecting an alternative library to React. We’re sorry for the churn. We don’t expect to win these teams back by making this change, but we do want to leave the door open. Friendly cooperation and competition in this space pushes us all forward, and we want to participate fully.
Upcoming React
Facebook is releasing React 16 next week. They are working on this from over a year and they have completely rewritten code for upcoming React 16 in order to unlock powerful features that will benefit everyone building user interfaces at scale. New license will be effective with upcoming React 16.
