
Ask HN: Truly “open source” create-react-app? - zhirzh
Since facebook isn&#x27;t going to change licence anytime soon, how long before JS community comes up with a truly &quot;open source&quot; create-react-app?
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acemarke
The question is mostly nonsensical. Create-React-App is an abstraction over a
prebuilt Webpack+Babel config, with a bunch of niceties for developer
experience like an in-page error overlay, linting for common mistakes, and so
on. The template it uses for a new app adds React and ReactDOM to your
dependencies, and imports React into the couple starting files, but it's
entirely up to you what you do with the project's contents after that. If you
want to delete any references to React and use Preact instead, you can. In
fact, you could probably go start using Mithril or Vue or something else if
you really wanted to.

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maxscam
> Since facebook isn't going to change licence anytime soon, how long before
> JS community comes up with a truly "open source" create-react-app?

Kind of confused what you mean, as I understand it both react and the boiler
are open source, but facebook has this policy which apparently means they can
revoke access if they want.. Anyway if this is the issue then your question is
really about alternatives to react, which there are certainly a few of.

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acemarke
No. The BSD+Patents license says that Facebook grants you a license to not
only the software, but any potential patents they might have around React.
_If_ you were to sue Facebook for something patent-related _first_, then you
would lose the patents protection, but not the license to actually use the
React software. Facebook has already granted you the license to use React in
general, and can't/won't just "revoke access if they want".

I have a large number of links to further information and discussion on the
topic at [https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux-
links/blob/master...](https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux-
links/blob/master/pros-cons-discussion.md#reacts-patents-license) .

