I'm not well versed enough in the various licenses to compare BSD+Patents and MIT, but in my opinion, this is more of a move to appease the community than anything dealing with the benefits/disadvantages of the license being used.
You may be right that this might actually reduce our rights, however, the MIT license is well known and accepted by many in the developer community. It's been around long enough that developers know what they are agreeing to when they use something with an MIT license. With the BSD+Patents license, the biggest concern was not understanding what you were getting into when using React.
Facebook recognized this and conceded despite still believing in the BSD+Patents license to be better. So in that sense, this makes a lot of sense as it:
* alleviates community concerns
* builds up their standing with developers
* generates a lot of good PR
* draws attention away from alternative solutions which were getting a lot of publicity from all of this (Vue.js, Marko, Preact, etc.)
It would be nice though to have a lawyer chime in on the differences between BSD+Patents and MIT.
You may be right that this might actually reduce our rights, however, the MIT license is well known and accepted by many in the developer community. It's been around long enough that developers know what they are agreeing to when they use something with an MIT license. With the BSD+Patents license, the biggest concern was not understanding what you were getting into when using React.
Facebook recognized this and conceded despite still believing in the BSD+Patents license to be better. So in that sense, this makes a lot of sense as it:
* alleviates community concerns
* builds up their standing with developers
* generates a lot of good PR
* draws attention away from alternative solutions which were getting a lot of publicity from all of this (Vue.js, Marko, Preact, etc.)
It would be nice though to have a lawyer chime in on the differences between BSD+Patents and MIT.