Thank you Wordpress.

Well...now back to writing code and shipping things...we can all put our irrational fantasies of patent litigation and being "unacquirable" startups due to React to rest.

It's not irrational when your companies lawyers say that you many not use React due to the licensing, and there is a very real chance you will be terminated if you do. Unless you mean that lawyers are irrational, in which case I would agree (throwing in judges and politicians and anyone else in the legal profession while we are at it).

With the old patents license, you had to be the one to initiate patent litigation with Facebook. The odds of needing to and wanting to get into patent litigation with Facebook are way less than 1%. That's an irrational fear. If something has a 1:100,000 chance of impacting you...I dunno man, when it comes to startups I can think of 1000 other things more likely to affect you. Companies that didn't even have patents were getting up in arms about this. It was quite a bit of irrational FUD. Even Wordpress's lawyer didn't have a problem with the license. They were just tired of fending off the FUD from their user base.

I don't work for a startup. I work for a Fortune 150 company with nearly 100,000 employees.

Lawyers do what they do at the behest of their clients.

If you want to blame someone for the litigious culture in the US, blame John Q Public and the corporations he works for.

You're right that this ultimately may only be relevant in a tiny number of cases, but there's no reason to take the risk that your case will be one of the unlucky ones. There are plenty of good React alternatives that don't carry that risk.

I love HN, and I hate to risk my account, but I'm tired of responses like this.

You're being an asswipe. There is no reason for you to respond this way. The lens upon which you view the world must be pretty god damned shallow to make these kinds of statements. If you want to be a fuckstick and reply like this, please find another community.

If you love HN, you shouldn't be damaging it like this. Every time an established user behaves badly they give license (pun intended) to new users to degrade the site further. That's seriously not cool, regardless of how wrong some other commenter was.

The last way we want people to be defending HN, even against perceived assholes, is by being assholes themselves. Would it really have cost you to make your point substantively?

Something about pots and kettles, and a plank in one's eye...

I guess I can adjust my tone. I have never heard of a startup being turned down for acquisition due to their front end framework of choice, but that became a fear that was legitimately passed around over React. It was irrational, in my opinion.

i hope you're willing to say what the problem is, rather than simply name-calling.

Agreed. Thank you for saying something.