Comment by Pulak on "I am Christopher Chedeau. Ask me anything."

The reality is that the cost of patent-related lawsuits is very real for Facebook. So real that it was put as a "risk factor" in the IPO document: "We are currently, and expect to be in the future, party to patent lawsuits and other intellectual property rights claims that are expensive and time consuming, and, if resolved adversely, could have a significant impact on our business, financial condition, or results of operations." ( sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/0001193125120… )

If you want to get sense of the dollar values at stake, consider that Facebook bought patents for $550 millions of dollars in 2012 ( techcrunch.com/2012/04/23/aols-new-patent-owners-… ), yes, you read it right, half a billion dollars!

React has had its share of controversies since the beginning and our strategy for dealing with them was to over-communicate and explain the reasoning. Unfortunately, we haven't done a good job on this one communication-wise.

The reason is that everything we say publicly on the subject can be used in court during one of those lawsuits. Given the crazy high stakes, the safest strategy is not to say anything. Even though you likely have hundreds of unanswered questions about it, I recommend reading through the three public posts we've published on the subject:

Thanks to the protection that this clause gives us, we have been able to open source so much of our core infrastructure at Facebook! As much as I believe that our open source work is impactful, it doesn't even remotely bring hundreds of millions of dollars to the table.

To conclude, is it an ideal solution? Not really. But like everything in software, it's all about finding the right set of tradeoffs. I've seen so many people empowered to build some really awesome things in response to us open sourcing React, Jest, GraphQL, React Native, Flow, Immutable, Draft, Yoga... that it may not have been the perfect set of tradeoffs, but it feels to me like a good one.

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