Hi, Paul from the React team here. There have been lots of questions about the license+patents combo we use. Recently our legal team answered some of those questions.
Yes, which is why Facebook's lawyers refuse to answer that question directly and instead obfuscate things by talking about "retaliation".
The Apache 2 license covers, in full, every public goal Facebook legal has stated they have and is 100% ethical. That Facebook refuses to use the Apache 2 license indicates they have additional, private, goals they do not want to own up to publicly.
It is a moderate, but known, amount of work to look through FB's patents, assess which are likely around React, and read through the claims. Considering it's possible, I certainly think that it's reasonable to ask you to do the work, or stop making the assertions.
It also doesn't address potential patents that are still within the 18 month filing window and are still secret.
"If you or your agent or exclusive licensee institute or order or agree to the institution of patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that this implementation of Polymer or any code incorporated within this implementation of Polymer constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, or inducement of patent infringement, then any patent rights granted to you under this License for this implementation of Polymer shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed."
I dont see how is that similar to react. It makes way more sense and is closer in spirit to apache I think.
"If you or your agent or exclusive licensee institute or order or agree to the institution of patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that this implementation of Polymer or any code incorporated within this implementation of Polymer constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, or inducement of patent infringement, then any patent rights granted to you under this License for this implementation of Polymer shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed."
There is a big difference, although it might not look like that.
"against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that THIS IMPLEMENTATION OF POLYMER or OR ANY CODE INCORPORATED WITHIN this implementation of Polymer".
I know I ask much of you but you can do it. BTW. congratulations on copy pasting the text I pasted above...
No, unless your patent counterclaim is related to Facebook's software licensed under the Facebook BSD+Patents license.
I think this sums up everything.
Except, you know, the one that matters.
If that doesn't prove that Facebook is acting in bad faith, I don't know what could convince you.
The current BSD license plus "additional patent grant", however, grants Facebook additional rights beyond the Apache 2 license that they refuse to admit to in their public communications, including this idiotic "FAQ". That's the "bad faith": Facebook won't publicly own up to why they want a worldwide, royalty free right to use a third-party's patents that have nothing to do with the software Facebook is licensing to them.
They don't own up publicly because it's unethical.
We deliberately want people to not be able to sue us for patent infringement without us being able to defend ourselves.
One can argue that facebook's method may be harsher than necessary (our rights grant is pretty much a copy of apache's 2), but i think people do not realize how often google/facebook/etc is getting sued for patent infringement.
Given how popular the software is, it deters people who are not NPE's.
This is critical though. Nobody is complaining about the Google (which is also used by Microsoft and Mozilla) retaliation clauses.
i think people do not realize how often google is getting sued for patent infringement.
Fair enough. If Facebook wants to make a public commitment to not use First Strike, the patent license would be acceptable. They have not, so it isn't.