Doc’s WordPress News Drop is a weekly report on the most pressing WordPress news. When the news drops, I will pick it up and deliver it right to you.
This week’s News Drop video is a little late. Every time we recorded it, the story would change again, but if you were wondering about the drama between WordPress and React JS, this is the video for you!
Love WordPress news, but hate reading? My name is Doc and this is Doc Pop’s News Drop.
It’s been a busy month for React, a flexible and efficient JavaScript library for building user interfaces. Last week, Matt Mullenweg published a post stating that WordPress would no longer be using the React front-end library to power WordPress projects, like the upcoming Gutenberg editor.
In the post, Matt talked about how great React is and how the WordPress team was on the verge of officially adopting React for WordPress and encouraging plugin developers to do the same, but he says that is no longer the plan, due to Facebook’s patent clause.
Facebook, the maintainers of React, had chosen to use a BSD-derived license that contained troubling terms surrounding patent litigation. Matt’s stance was that this made React to risky to use for WordPress projects, so they would choose some other library going forward. Probably VueJS or Preact.
Apache Foundation had also taken a similar stance to Facebook’s patent clause by banning React from its new software projects.
Here’s the cool part though, shortly after Matt’s post went viral, Facebook announced that they will be switching their license. With the release of React 16 sometime in the next week, the license will just be regular MIT license with no patent additions.
That’s pretty neat, right?
There’s no official news on what this means for WordPress and React moving forward. In an update, Matt states “Our decision to move away from React, based on their previous stance, has sparked a lot of interesting discussions in the WordPress world. Particularly with Gutenberg there may be an approach that allows developers to write Gutenberg blocks (Gutenblocks) in the library of their choice including Preact, Polymer, or Vue, and now React could be an officially-supported option as well.”
With the new MIT license, do you think WordPress should officially embrace React, or do you think there’s a better front-end library out there for us to use? Let us know in the comments.
That’s it for this week’s news drop, if you like what we are doing, please help us out by liking this video and subscribing to our channel for more weekly WordPress news. We’ll see you next week.
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