Facebook re-licenses React under MIT license after developer backlash A major barrier to the adoption of Facebook’s React front-end library has been its license. Facebook chose to use a BSD-derived license that contained some troubling terms surrounding patent litigation . But this is no longer an issue, as Facebook has announced it intends to re-license React – and several other Facebook-owned open source projects, including Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js – under the popular MIT license. Explaining the decision, Facebook engineering director Adam Wolff wrote that “React is the foundation of a broad ecosystem of open source software for the web, and we don’t want to hold back forward progress for nontechnical reasons.” Facebook has vigorously defended the former React license – known as the BSD + Patents license – in the past. In an August blog post , Wolff explained that Facebook needed to reconcile its open-source contributions with the risk of patent li...