WordPress has been using React for several years, and its projects are almost entirely based on React.

Many of you are no doubt aware of the uproar caused by the React licensing agreement (check out Facebook’s official announcement and there are plenty of references online for those who are not). In short, you can’t use React to compete with Facebook or its partners, and your React license may be revoked if there’s a legal dispute.

The license granted hereunder will terminate, automatically and without notice,
if you (or any of your subsidiaries, corporate affiliates or agents) initiate
directly or indirectly, or take a direct financial interest in, any Patent
Assertion:
(i)
against Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or corporate
affiliates,
(ii)
against any party if such Patent Assertion arises in whole or
in part from any software, technology, product or service of Facebook or any of
its subsidiaries or corporate affiliates, or
(iii)
against any party relating
to the Software. –
facebook/react

This approach is known as Facebook’s BSD license + Patent open source agreement.

As a result, in July 2017, the Apache Foundation banned the use of JAR packages that follow the BSD License + Patent open source agreement.

Automattic, which runs WordPress, said recently that it would ditch React.

Automattic refactored http://WordPress.com, calypso-Wordpress.com, with React a few years ago, which is one of the larger Open source projects based on React.

This post by WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg explains that while they were happy with React and had been waiting for the patent issue to be resolved, they finally decided to give up on React because there was no way to ignore the patent issue.

The WordPress team is already working on a new technology model and will be reworking the React project (although this may delay the official release of the new product, WordPress/ Gutenberg, until next year). Matt Mullenweg also mentioned that the team recently spoke with the core Vue developers. There will also be a series of related articles, which I will keep an eye on. If you are interested, you can also directly follow Matt Mullenweg’s Blog.

The original:
On React and WordPress

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