Meta has given up its ownership of the open source React JavaScript library, donating it to a new React Foundation under the Linux Foundation, delivering on a promise made in October 2025.

The React Foundation launched 24 February to oversee React, the React Native library, and other related projects such as JSX. The group’s eight founding platinum members include Meta, Amazon and Microsoft.

Meta Software Engineer Eli White said: “This transition to a neutral, open governance model ensures that the ecosystem’s future is shaped by the very people and companies that rely on it every day. Meta remains deeply invested in React’s success.”

Meta's Head of React Seth Webster will also be the first executive director for the foundation, which is now working to finalise the technical governance structure for React and take legal ownership of the library.

Webster previously stated he would retain his role at Meta but his personal website says he left the company in 2025 to work at the React Foundation full time.

History of React

At its core, React is a JavaScript library used to build web and app user interfaces. React Native is a UI software framework designed for developers to use React in native apps for platforms like Android and iOS.

See also: React2Shell exploits are going “wild” and even Microsoft is struggling

React was created at Facebook in 2011 and open sourced two years later in May 2013. Now, it is one of the world’s most popular web technologies, with 44.7% of developers either working or planning to work with it according to the 2025 Stack Overflow survey.

The project has not been without its troubles. Meta, then Facebook, was pressured into moving React to an MIT license in 2017 after a back and forth with the Apache Software Foundation over its ban of React due to worries about its BSD + Patents license that allowed Meta to revoke licenses during patent disputes.

Meta's donations

Meta’s revealed its intention to donate the project entirely in October 2025, stating it had “outgrown the confines of any one company” and that the change would let it “give React ecosystem projects more resources.”

Speaking to The New Stack in October, Webster said: "Over the past decade, but really in the past six years or so, React has become an indispensable part of the way that the web is built and runs, [the way that] Chrome works and the way that mobile apps are built. It’s become more important than a single team should be responsible for maintaining.”

The foundation's founding members are Amazon, Callstack, Expo, Huawei, Meta, Microsoft, Software Mansion and Vercel (which created the popular Next.js framework for giving React applications server-side and static rendering).

Meta has history of donating its most popular open source projects, with the PyTorch Foundation also set up under Linux after Meta donated the deep learning framework.

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