Google Launches New Mobile Web Specialist Certification for Developers
September 26, 2017
WP-CLI Team announces new Project for Theme and Plugin Checksum Verification
October 2, 2017Facebook released React 16 with MIT License after Slammed by Open Source Community
Open source community pressurised Facebook to relicense React JS when Apache Server Foundation populated its list of disallowed licenses for Apache PMC members in Category X with Facebook’s BSD+Patents license. The React community members started rallying around a petition to re-license React. After this incident, many open source maintainers planned to drop React and started looking for new alternatives. In a deliberate move, Matt Mullenweg announced that WordPress community would rewrite Gutenberg editor which is being developed with React JS Library.
After the opposition from WordPress and other open source communities, Facebook announced to re-license React, Flow, Jest, and Immutable.js under the MIT License. It acknowledged the fact that it was not able to convince open source community about the benefits of BSD+Patents license.
React V16.0 was released on September 26, 2017, under MIT License. They also release the previous version, i.e. React 15.6.2 under MIT License for the users who would not be able to upgrade immediately.
It’s still fuzzy whether WordPress will continue the work on Gutenberg with React or they will shift to another library. In the summit of WordPress community that took place in Paris last June, core contributors had originally decided in favor of React. Although this decision had been saved and not made public after open source community started putting pressure on Facebook to re-license the React.
In a public statement, Gutenberg Engineer Riad Benguella said that he was tired of this drama. According to him, WordPress community invested days of hard work to create the best framework for WP and this change will just increase more thinking, complexity and uncertainty to their decision. WordPress community will have to look for an alternative library, and they’ll have to refigure everything.
Mullenweg has still not made clear about WordPress examining other libraries. Nevertheless, it’s great news for all the members of React community who petitioned to re-license the React.
