If you think some technology companies look good and are "changing the world" every day... you should take a look at their user terms and legal documents. The seriousness of the filth hidden in them is shocking.
Recently, the internal software engineering teams of Baidu and Alibaba have done one thing - deprecated React.
please explain:
React is a front-end tool used to develop user interfaces for software or Internet services. It was first used in Instagram, developed by Facebook and open sourced in 2013, and subsequently gained widespread support from the community. In terms of front-end development, React is currently the most widely used tool in the industry. Some business departments of Baidu and Alibaba are using it. There are also many startups whose products are very React-based, or even completely based on React.
But why have both Baidu and Alibaba recently decided to say goodbye to React?
For developers, the license is their "user agreement" for using open source software. Facebook's open source method is different from other companies. Others generally use licenses recognized by the open source community. Facebook's two licenses, the first is the general BSD license, and the second is its own Written patent license (patent grant).
The open source community is discovering that Facebook has "stolen" a bunch of clauses in React's patent license that scare and chill developers:
Legal documents are usually difficult to pronounce. The general idea of this paragraph is: If you initiate a patent lawsuit against Facebook and its subsidiaries and other related entities, or initiate a patent lawsuit against other companies using React, or if Facebook takes the initiative to sue you, you respond with a counterclaim, Your license to use React will automatically terminate.
Translated into adult language,If you feel Facebook has violated your intellectual property rights, you cannot sue Facebook! If Facebook sues you, you can’t sue back! Because while suing, your product will be dead - you can no longer use React.
To be more straightforward:If you use React in your product, even just a little bit, the intellectual property you own in the product is equivalent to giving it directly to Facebook for free. use.
Originally, this license model was very confusing for developers, but since React is supported by Facebook and the open source ecosystem surrounding it is also very sound, the result is that React is easy to use, so everyone just makes do with it. Now that we have discovered the weird terms in this patent license, everyone can’t sit still...
This matter has been quarreling in the front-end technology circle since last year, and has intensified since then, and the situation is getting worse: the open source community has discovered the same license model and terms in more popular Facebook open source projects. Developers believe that Facebook's licensing model is poisoning the community and polluting the open source spirit.
According to the Zhihu column of Hu Huanming, who has been paying attention to the development of the situation, this incident has caused great divisions in the React community, and has also intensified the rift between React supporters and supporters of other alternatives such as Vue and Angular. “Some people began to curse the evil Open source hooligans, some people started to threaten us and said that we should use Vue and Angular (note: substitutes for React) instead of using them. Some people called for staying calm and waiting to see what happens, and we have to trust the organization."
Why is everyone so worried about Facebook's move?
Let's give an example:
You founded a technology company, React is very comfortable to use, product development is fast, and the company is getting bigger and bigger; suddenly one day Facebook makes a product exactly like yours, and you can't sue it, because when you sue, your The product is dead because Facebook revoked your authorization to use React.
This is no joke, don’t forget that Facebook has copied startup products more than once or twice. For example, Facebook has copied individual functions of Snapchat several times, but failed in the first few times. Finally, it copied the short video story function directly and put it into its four mobile phones, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and FB Messenger, which have hundreds of millions or even billions of users. in the product. From this perspective, it is not easy for Snapchat to survive and go public.
Some fans of React and Facebook said, don’t be kidding, Facebook is so big and has not entered China, who cares about you? Let’s change the example: you use React to build a social product, which is very popular among young people in China; suddenly one day Facebook enters China and thinks your product is good and wants to acquire it; you raise the price, and Facebook sues you for infringement to lower the price. , the rights and interests of you and your shareholders have been infringed, just because you chose the technology for convenience. Not all companies are as lucky as Snapchat, not to mention that Facebook also has an internal tool to detect startups that may pose a threat to its business, thereby making it easier for legal, corporate M&A, and product and engineering departments to act quickly.
Is Facebook’s licensing model really a patent troll? Will it really abuse license terms to suppress competition, inhibit innovation, and maintain its monopoly position?
The company’s explanation is that it is for “purely defensive purposes” and the terms exist only to protect its core patents and curb unnecessary litigation (patent litigation is indeed rampant in the United States, and there are many professional patent trolls). So far, Facebook has not invoked the terms in the license to proactively initiate litigation. There is no precedent, and it is not yet known whether it has suppressed lawsuits from other companies. “Just like California technology companies have non-compete clauses in their employment contracts, but I haven’t seen many companies actually implement them,” said Lin Hong, developer of the iOS machine learning model market CoreML.Store.
Small and medium-sized technology companies, especially Chinese companies, don't seem to have too many concerns about this. Peng Yusi, CTO of Internet business database IT Juezi, believes that small companies can continue to use React. Even if they fall into the worst case scenario and are targeted by Facebook, it is much easier to change the structure than that of large companies, and they can also consider being acquired. " It is more reliable for small factories to do a good job in business and to be good users. Whether they can survive is still unknown.”
But not all small companies can relax their vigilance. For example, the cloud document tool Graphite Document uses React/React Native technology extensively on its web, iOS and Android mobile terminals. “At present, this matter will not affect the use of React by Graphite Documents.” Li Zihua, the company’s technical director, told PingWest Pinwan, “But what I am more worried about is the impact it will have on the React community, which will in turn affect (recruitment) candidates. The number of people, and React open source projects coming out of the community.”
Li Zihua said that he has been paying attention to the React license incident, and has also conducted internal discussions on whether to migrate from React to other technologies. The conclusion is to maintain the status quo and observe the progress of the situation: "We are a company that relies heavily on React, so de-React is definitely It’ll be a little tougher.”
But when it comes to Alibaba and Baidu, their individual business departments are heavily dependent on React, and the de-React movement will be accelerated. Because large companies have strong awareness of legal protection and have many legal personnel, their engineers have to say goodbye to familiar technologies and work overtime to migrate or even re-develop them due to compliance risks. A Baidu public relations person told PingWest that Baidu’s internal abandonment of React is indeed true; people familiar with the matter revealed that Alibaba has not yet made a final notification, but most of the technical decision-makers support the abandonment of React.
Through legal documents such as user agreements and open source licenses, we can get a glimpse of the common ethical issues of large companies such as anti-openness, anti-innovation, and cheating users, which are obscured by ambitious goals and high technology. There have been too many examples recently.
For example, in the past few days, Weibo has been in a turmoil over its user terms. Netizens found this clause in the terms: "Users are not allowed to authorize any third party to use Weibo content without the platform's prior written permission."
The trigger for the incident was that Toutiao poached Weibo's corners, found big Vs to provide content, and "without permission" captured users' Weibo content and synchronized it to Toutiao. Weibo clarified that the user terms only exist to prevent third parties from grabbing Weibo content without permission, but this still makes users feel that their copyrights have been violated - after all, the final right of interpretation lies with Weibo.
The theft of 140 million user data of Equifax, a credit rating agency, that occurred in the United States two weeks ago is even more bizarre: due to its own system vulnerabilities, half of the U.S. population's information was stolen, and the credit system that has been running for a hundred years is facing a critical juncture. Equifax Still doesn't care about the interests of users at all, just wants to protect themselves.
The company has launched a website that allows users to check whether their information has been stolen. Regardless of whether it has been stolen, it will recommend you to pay for a value-added service. Hidden in the user agreement for this service is "Becoming a user of this company must give up suing the company." "rights" is such a strange clause.
For Weibo, it can fully develop content interfaces and exchange protocols (similar to IFTTT) that can be used by third parties to satisfy users who want to use their own created and owned content legally and compliantly, as well as those who want to use it on multiple social networks Users who sync content. It can also develop a better-used third-party embedded component for Weibo and promote it to other platforms, and enter into covenants with other platforms to establish a more standardized format for quoting Weibo content. It is not decent, efficient or open to start building barriers and cities when encountering competition. What's more, the content and the right to use the content originally belong to the users and should never belong to the platform.
Equifax’s use of the user agreement to avoid lawsuits is a blatant act of moral turpitude. It exposed that this American "private" company, which is responsible for the national economy and people's livelihood, is not as secure and does not value user privacy as stated in its advertisements. Corporate greed is more important than user interests.
In a book that thoroughly deconstructs Harvard Business School’s Gold Pass, author Duff McDonald points out, “When students enter Harvard Business School, they believe that the purpose of business is to provide products and services that enhance Social welfare. By the time they graduate, they believe that maximizing shareholder value is the goal of the company." This is not wrong, but don't treat users too much.
Facebook, which talks about "community" and "connection" every day, seems a bit hypocritical at this time.
Facebook CTO Mike Schroff announced React Native, and the blogging service WordPress has been developing in React for several years and decided to deprecate it last weekend. Matt Mullenweg, founder of its operating company Automattic, announced the reason on his blog:
Facebook said it would study this issue, and the result of the study was to maintain the status quo, because removing the patent terms would waste money and time on legal matters. This is a Facebook family thing and I have nothing to say about it.
A few years ago we rewrote the entire WordPress.com in React. This year, we decided to use React to develop a new generation of editor Gutenberg. I even prepared a statement and a blog, and prepared a few thousand words to praise how useful React is, but that blog will never be published.
We decided to use another technology to rewrite Gutenberg, which may slow down the project progress and not be released until next year; we will also use the final technology to rewrite WordPress.com, which may take longer. Our goal is to have no patent issues and not let patent risks be passed on to our users.
Most people applauded Mullenweg for his tough but correct decision.
In July this year, the Apache Software Foundation pointed out that Facebook's BSD+ patented license model passed risks to downstream users, protected the rights and interests of the licensor rather than the licensor (user), and thus violated the policies of the Apache Software Foundation, announcing that Block this license model. As for measures, the organization announced that all software using the Apache open source license must not use components with Facebook's BSD+ proprietary license model.
As one of the world's largest open source community management and mediation organizations, the Apache Software Foundation's notice represents the opinion of the open source community to a certain extent: "unhappy". Facebook wants to gain respect and contributions from the open source community, but also wants to protect its own interests with non-standard licenses. How can it have the best of both worlds?
In Peng Yusi’s view, Facebook’s patent license terms are similar to those of Overlord. Li Zihua tends to believe that Facebook's legal affairs may be leading the whole thing, which is not what the main contributors and managers of open source projects within the company want to see. The intention of defending against patent disputes is understandable, but from an outsider's perspective, he still finds it difficult to agree with this licensing method. "The disadvantages of this licensing method are obvious. The core of everyone's discussion and concern is that Facebook infringes on its own patents."
Xie Junyuan, a research assistant at the University of Washington and a major contributor to the deep learning framework MXNet, said on Zhihu: “This Facebook license actually got off to a very bad start. Large companies can hinder small companies by stuffing private goods into open source software. Rise up and further consolidate its monopoly position. Personally, I think this behavior that pollutes the open source spirit is very bad. I hope Facebook can turn back its prodigal son and switch to an open and friendly license like Apache2.0."
Lin Hong believes that this approach is very consistent with Facebook’s values.