Patent law and net neutrality have just about nothing to do with each other, but there one one overlap that came to mind when reading this article.
I remember the moral panic over the idea of losing net neutrality, all painting cable companies as evil anti-competitive extortionists that would exploit the lack of FCC regulations. Others argued that the panic was unjustified and the cable companies actually would function better with less regulation.
But in that fight, the concern for me was not in what ultimately happened to my internet connection (I will use telegraphy to communicate if life put me in that position). What woke me up was the blunt reminder that I’ve an implicit agreement — either by legislation or license — with some party and I should re-assess that relationship and ask if its right for me. That reminder came up with cable companies, and it came up again with Facebook.
Even if the cable companies and Facebook didn’t intend to do the evils the public alleges, the implications of the agreement were still enough to get me thinking about how I should position myself. You all should do the same.
I am a lover of the MIT license because I want to take all risks natural to my actions without the licensor adding constraints. A hyperscript function and state graph are not hard to implement, and Facebook certainly wasn’t the first to do either. So as far as I’m concerned, abandoning React, Yarn, and the like is just a matter of avoiding complications, not making a statement about the licensor's intentions.
In short, I encourage people to abandon Facebook’s software not because Facebook is evil or that their patent clause is an immediate threat. I encourage the to leave because even paper tigers cause you to pause and wonder about the intentions of its creator, and that’s a distraction if avoiding their software won’t slow down your venture.
> If Facebook patents cover React (diffing, componentization, etc)…
Alternatives that handle redraws with hyperscripts like Mithril, or state management that changes when rendering even happens like MobX, are not improvements on componentization or diffing. They are called alternatives for a reason.
Educate me: How does Facebook patent or improve on componentization? I thought that dividing up your program into chunks and put a bow on each of them was one of the oldest tricks in the book, so I hope you aren’t suggesting the shape of React’s API somehow gives them leverage on every other API that vaguely looks React-ish. If so, that tiger is not made of paper.
