[hardwaresofton]

Yeah, and if Facebook DOES infringe on a patent you own, and it's a valid case? You then have to rewrite your frontend code base as fast as you can?

At it's best this is like some sort of warped "you infringe on my patents and I'll infringe on yours" kind of thing, assuming MAD means it doesn't become a very-uneven suing war. This case is also bad news, because larger companies are much more capable of infringing on your patents and competing with smaller companies in a conglomerate style.

Amazon is a conglomerate. Alphabet/Google is a conglomerate. Somehow, everyone in the government who manages anti-trust (whether that should be a thing is another debate), seems to be asleep at the wheel, literally everyday.

Also, guess who has lots of resources to rebuild a shitty copy of ingenuous software they found online? Big corporations do. All the starry eyed CS grads who want to go work for Big Conglomerate Co. are going to be rearing to re-implement Redis in 50K LOC, but it's harder for some small company (or just random open source project) to re-build the parts of their app that used react in some other framework.

[unscaled]

If you are a small shop, you just don't have the money to file a patent claim against Facebook. That's exactly what the parent post told you: patent litigation is expensive.

The PATENTS file is red herring. If you're a small player and you launch a patent lawsuit against Facebook you stand no chance of winning. Facebook has thousands of patents in its portfolio, and software patents being broad as they are, you're invariably infringing one of them.

You know what, scrap that. Even if you were a somewhat large player with your own respectable patent portfolio, and Facebook had almost no patents you could never win. Why? Because this already happened, dear internet:

https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/23/facebook-patent-fortress/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/facebook-...

TLDR: Yahoo sued Facebook before their IPO with 10 infringed patents (not just 1), trying to scare Facebook into giving them money. Facebook only had 56 patents, but they had money, so they bought up 1400 more patents, and countersued with just 10 of them. Yahoo realized they don't have the money to win a lawsuit against Facebook, and meekly submitted and cross-licensed the patents to Facebook.

Now imagine trying to copy cat the Yahoo move with two guys in a garage who own just a single patent against a stronger and more prepared Facebook that has thousands.

[hardwaresofton]

You might have responded to the wrong post -- I completely agree (I think I'm the parent poster you're referring to) :)

To give this comment meaningful content:

https://mithril.js.org/

https://vuejs.org/

https://www.nativescript.org/

[vonmoltke]

> Yeah, and if Facebook DOES infringe on a patent you own, and it's a valid case? You then have to rewrite your frontend code base as fast as you can?

In that case, you have two other options:

* Quietly swap out your frontend before you file

* Continue using React and dare Facebook to produce a patent they can actually claim

This, of course, is based on the assumption that your frontend is a significant portion of your product. If your frontend is a trivial portion, then "rewrite your frontend code base as fast as you can" is also trivial.

Edit: fixed formatting