I agree, in a perfect word, I could take Facebook's word that "We respect third party IP, including patents, and expect others to respect our IP too."

I just can't unsee the way this theoretically could allow Facebook to partake in patent infringement without fear of retribution.

Yeah, pointing out how they would never plan for a meritorious lawsuit isn't really defending them, it's pointing out that the argument that they even might requires a lot of assumptions of good faith on Facebook's part that make no sense.

It's possible that there were two groups in FB that were for this, some that were naive enough to just not understand it, and some that totally understood it and let the others continue with their misconceptions. I don't believe there existed a group that actually understood it and it's ramifications and thought it was benign.

I don’t get the obsession with React. It’s a great concept but vdom isn’t hard. Many great alternatives preact, inferno. Slightly different ones like snabdom. We use virtual-jade which allows us to build templates in jade as clean functions.

Facebook has gone too far with React and its Trojan patent clause. So easy to get away from it though with smaller, faster and more focused libraries.

No company hopes or expects a meritorious lawsuit against them to exist.

But, and especially concerning patents, assuming one can't exist is pure folly. And designing your own licenses in a way that prevents someone else from initiating a meritorious lawsuit against you seems quite intentional, especially since they refused to back down once it was pointed out (and especially because there was already precedent in open source licenses for doing this in a sane way, e.g. the Apache License, Version 2.0, and presumably others too).