Wal-Mart, Baidu, Spotify, Netflix, Coinbase, Wired, Yahoo, Atlassian, AirBnB, Asana, Atlassian, BBC, Chegg, CloudFlare, CNN.com, Codecademy, Coursera, Craftsy, Dailymotion, Dropbox, Expedia, Facebook, Feedly, Flipboard, HipChat, IMDb, Imgur, Instagram, Khan Academy, KISSmetrics, Mattermark, Minerva Project, Netflix, OkCupid, Rackspace, Rally Software, Ralph Lauren, Reddit, Redfin, Salesforce, Squarespace, The New York Times, Trunk Club, Twitter, Uber, University of Cincinnati, Venmo, WhatsApp, Wired, Wix, WordPress, Yahoo, Zendesk, Microsoft, Apple

If y'all think you're going to find some edge case that these companies lawyers haven't already...

Well, I guess it depends on what you mean 'almost every single large tech company', but React is used by Facebook (of course), Apple, Twitter, Yahoo, Netflix, Amazon, just to name a few.

I know atleast one of these companies (I can't speak for the rest) had a pre-existing bi-lateral patent agreement with Facebook which rendered the react patent clause irrelevant, allowing them to use react without concern. Without that existing agreement this would not have been the case.

I would certainly concede that. And I'm not trying to rain on React's parade here. I'm just saying that HN is particularly pro-React as a community.

you have only named a few though; 'almost every single large tech company' requires a particular definition of large tech company or a lot more than a few to be a useful(ly true) statement

Take a look here:

https://github.com/facebook/react/wiki/sites-using-react

...that's obviously not complete, either. If you think of a large tech company the odds are they are using react somewhere for something, be it public facing or internal tooling. Many of the companies that aren't actively using React do so because they have their own JS stacks to dogfood (like Google and Angular).

Google hardly dogfoods Angular. They use Closure for most of their apps. SPF for YouTube. Polymer in some places. GWT in many others.

Well, anecdotally speaking of course, my company does work for most of the major (a) banks, (b) telcos and (c) insurance companies in Canada, and the majority of them are moving from Angular 1.x to React (because Angular 4 is a mess) for their front-end work, both on the public and secure side of things.

Hopefully they've all done their due diligence..

That's interesting. I've done a good deal of work in all three verticals and introducing a restricted license in any of their environments would have been a tough sell that involved a legal review and a well documented business case. I can think of a few where I can guarantee they would never allow it - and not based on any problems with React's license in particular, but because of internal history.

I wouldn't be surprised if the choice of front-end framework for website development is still below the radar of legal/compliance for some of these places..

A lot of these groups still see front-end tech as just HTML and CSS..

What sort of things would banks, telcos, and insurance companies typically patent? These don't strike me as innovation-oriented companies.

If you don't have any patents, you're not really risking anything using React.

Are you joking, or you just don't know? Telcos alone have a huge list of patents which they are happy to use in the courtroom, and they have won cases in the millions USD. Verizon ranked 52nd in the world for patents granted in 2016.

Bank of America was ranked 124th for its number of U.S. patents granted in 2016.

http://www.ipo.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/2016_Top-300-P...

wouldn't that mean that your company is covered by the react clause but your clients aren't? of course they're not worried, if they're a separate entity they aren't the one in the agreement.

We typically deliver pages and/or SPAs into their existing environments, where these libraries are already installed globally, so I don't think so.