Companies change. People change. You don't want it written into the license like that and depend on good will. If good will were enough we wouldn't have laws or government.
I don’t know if this really answers my question. You have to assume Airbnb, for example, has a legal presence that is very involved in tech decisions and how they might hurt the business. What I imagine was a very thorough scrutinization process came back with a green light to use it. Most of the startups worried about this don’t have the luxury of anything near that level of legal scrutiny, but can’t a startup that can’t afford it extract some value from a company like Airbnb using it without worries?
It's possible that Airbnb has their own, separate license with Facebook. It's also possible that they decided they could absorb the cost of a countersuit if they ever sue Facebook over a patent. I don't think speculating about Airbnb's situation gives any assurances to an entirely unrelated company.
I’d agree if Airbnb were the only large company using React, but they’re not. They were just the company I chose to mention. There’s also Twitter who just went all in building Twitter lite, Wix who is huge in the native navigation world, and plenty more. So would you guess that Facebook is negotiating a separate license with all of them? And besides, wouldn’t that nullify concerns even more because that means they’re willing to negotiate a more lenient license with any company that makes enough money to make them worth knocking off?
I’m not trying to be sarcastic, I just really don’t understand how these fears are justified. Besides, if Facebook decides they want to crush you and use React as a shield, you’ll probably have bigger problems in that moment than your choice of front end libraries. A bigger problem, I would think, is that you have something worth Facebook thinks is worth stealing. Facebook doesn’t need a React patent clause to smother a company.
Those were also just a few examples. Companies negotiate reciprocal agreements for baskets of patents all the time. Who knows what's in the basket? My point was that they have circumstances that don't apply to any other company, and there's no way to know what they are. Either the license itself, as written, works for you or it doesn't.
I see what you’re saying and I agree. But to continue down this path one last time, I still think what you’re saying meshes with my original point. If you’re big enough for Facebook to care to leverage this against you, you’ll have a legal team who can negotiate one of these nice reciprocal agreements. Until you reach that point, Zuck or his theoretical sinister successor probably won’t know, or care, that your company exists. Can we at least agree on that?
I can agree with the tautology that if a company is too insignificant for Facebook to care, then they're safe. But it doesn't take a large company to be a thorn in Facebook's side.
Imagine a tiny company finally figures out UX and solves some of the problems with spam, load balancing, etc. on a decentralized social network. If the cat gets out of the bag, they're an existential threat to Facebook.