Facebook's React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js are popular among developers. But a barrier exists that prevents their spread, and that is the license.
When they were first released, Facebook chose to use a BSD-derived license for them that apparently contained some troubles in its terms and surrounding its patent litigation.
After several weeks of disappointment, developers backlash and uncertainty, although Facebook still believes on its BSD + Patents license, the social network acknowledges that it failed to decisively convince the community.
Some of the disappointment came from Automattic that said it would cease using React in its Gutenberg editor project, and would excise the library from the company's ground-up rewrite of WordPress.com, codenamed Calypso. Apache has also banned the library and all of its BSD + Patents-licensed code from its projects.
For that reason, Facebook is re-licensing the projects under the popular MIT license.
"We're re-licensing these projects because React is the foundation of a broad ecosystem of open source software for the web, and we don't want to hold back forward progress for nontechnical reasons," said Facebook engineering director Adam Wolff.
Previously, Wolff explained that Facebook needed to reconcile its open-source contributions with the risk of patent litigation. This resulted in the controversial clauses which state users can lose the patent grant associated with the software, if they should sue Facebook for patent infringement.
He noted Facebook believes that "if this license were widely adopted, it could actually reduce meritless litigation for all adopters."
Facebook is including the license update with React 16.
The company has been working on React 16 for more than a year, and have completely rewritten all of its internals in order to improve its performance, and to provide more features for everyone that wants to build user interfaces at scale.
"We hope that our work will inspire developers everywhere, whether they use React or not," continued Wolff.
"We're looking forward to putting this license discussion behind us and getting back to what we care about most: shipping great products."