I agree. I was working at a somewhat large IT company (~30k employees) this year. I made a plea for React and while our development section agreed, it got bounced by legal because of these points.
If Facebook is really serious about Open Source, they also have to make their licence so that every organisation is free to use it.
Being "serious about Open Source" doesn't mean a commitment to do anything to support people using your software.
It's the opposite, actually: the original copyleft licenses such as the GPL were explicitly designed to promote Open Source by hindering adoption in some cases, namely those where companies want to distribute derivative works commercially.
Then the BSD/MIT-style licenses weakened this restriction. So you're free to use React in a commercial product.
But Facebook, Apple etc. care a lot about patents these days. Not offensively, as far as we can tell, but they have now been burned repeatedly by often trivial patents being used to extract hundreds of million from them.
So they added these 'patentleft' clauses to their licenses to essentially undermine the patent system in regards to software. As it gets more difficult to build anything without some library that includes this clause, fewer and fewer actors will have the freedom to sue without consequences.
Being opposed to patents on intellectual property in the first case, I can only applaud these efforts. In fact, they should probably go further and extend the protection to everyone: If you use IP patents against Jane Doe, you may no longer use React.
The only problem is the rise of entities focused entirely on patent-litigation.
> It's the opposite, actually: the original copyleft licenses such as the GPL were explicitly designed to promote Open Source by hindering adoption in some cases, namely those where companies want to distribute derivative works commercially.
I'm usually not the one to defend GPL but I want to point out that AFAIK distributing derivative works commercially is totally fine for GPL - you just have to follow the rules in the license (provide source code under the same licence).
If Facebook is really serious about Open Source, they also have to make their licence so that every organisation is free to use it.