Have you ever worked at a large company with its own legal team? It's not such a large mystery.
I'm not sure how changing course from a direction that could have neutralized patents, to one engineered so patent aggressors aren't hurt, is something that can be considered a win for the open source community.
MIT is like a standard when it comes to OS. At big companies, complicated licencies are very hard to get approval of.
No it didn't. Facebook made a nothing-up-the-sleeve showing; you had recourse if they decided to "come after you", because your right to countersue was something that was explicitly protected in the PATENTS grant.
Removing the grant, on the other hand, contributes to a world where everyone else can come after you. That should be scarier, because the set containing entities who aren't Facebook is much larger than the set of entities who are. (And the latter set is much less likely to sue—virtually guaranteed not to sue, even—for the exact reason mentioned above.)
This is why Facebook's move to neutralize patents failed - everyone's suddenly in love with their own patents, even if they agree that the system is broken.
It was a good idea to scrap the clause to prevent the community from fracturing, but there's no triumph here - they failed to convince people that patents were a scourge to be eliminated.
"We grant you a right to use all patents we have covering this work.
[1] If you sue us regarding a patent you claim covers this work, we revoke your right to use all patents we hold covering this work.
[2] If we sue you regarding an unrelated patent, you retain your right to use patents covering this work for purposes of this work.
[3] If you sue us regarding an unrelated patent, you retain your right to use patents covering this work for purposes of this work."
The entire point of people being annoyed about this is that Facebook specifically didn't include the [3] grant. Consequently, this was more about Facebook attempting to use React's popularity to make themselves immune to patent litigation (as anyone relying on React wouldn't have been able to sue Facebook for any patent without losing the React patents grants).
http://www.businessinsider.com/just-so-were-clear-facebook-t...
Big organizations require more time and people to reach consensus at different hierarchical levels. Probably the legal department was the bottleneck.
Either way, it's a good move.
Be careful. Facebook hasn’t said they’re removing the patents override completely. All they’ve said here is they’re changing their licensing, not what they’ll do. They may end up with BSD+Different patents grant. Make sure you check the changes next week. I doubt it will be straight BSD or they would have said it.