[politician]

Hi James, it looks like you've invested effort in the Expo SDK via expo.io to promote React, but aren't currently monetizing it nor do you have any patents under Expo that may be at risk. I understand that you're in YC S16, but the scenario below assumes you haven't received any investment yet.

Let's suppose that Expo SDK 2 has valuable IP that you've protected with a patent, and that you are now seeking investment so that you can grow a business around it.

It works! Investors are excited, customers love it, and business is growing! Well, until Facebook comes around and releases the Fxpo SDK with a large media launch at F10. It contains some of the same technology you added to Expo SDK 2, perhaps even some of that patented technology that enticed your investors. Wow, that sucks. So you call up your lawyers and setup a meeting with Facebook.

At the meeting Facebook says, "Tut tut tut. James, you can't sue us for patent infringement because we'll pull your license to use React. James, your entire business is built around React and it might cost, what, $1M USD to replace it with Angular. And how long might that take? Months? Years?! James, we see that you're a smart businessman. Look, we'll buy your company for $200,000. Think it over."

What will you do? Sell Expo Inc to Facebook for pennies, or fight them in court with the lawyer's fees and the loss of use of your money making product? Will you have enough cash to cover the gap? Will your investors, anxious to get their 5% return over the 10 year life of the fund, stick behind you or will they write this one off?

When you look back at the time you lost to dealing with this crap, wouldn't you have rather just used Angular or Ember or... Elm?

[jameside]

This scenario's premise assumes Expo's success could heavily depend on claiming patent infringement against Facebook. If that were true then it'd probably be simpler not to use Facebook open source under the BSD+Patents license.

But for several reasons, the Expo team is working without the assumption we need the option of suing Facebook for patent infringement to be successful. I find companies that are sufficiently durable for other reasons to be more appealing to people whose livelihoods depend on the company in some way, including developers, the team, and investors.

[politician]

Agreed; Expo is in a unique situation that favors partnership with Facebook to maximize the penetration of the React license terms into the broader ecosystem. As such, Expo has natural resistance to the scenario above in that Facebook would not go after a promoter of its license strategy.

That said, Expo is sort of an outlier in this regard and other teams using React or other affected technologies in the process of building their businesses are unlikely to have the protection of such a natural alliance.

Beyond strategic alignment and intellectual property protections, it is hard to imagine what else might balance the scales between a global gigacorp and a $5M SV startup.