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Comment by liuliu | Hacker News Reader

MIT license doesn't contain any patent clause. So it is the same as BSD + Patents with patents part revoked. Thus, in theory, FB can still have a case on patent over React even if you use the source with copyright grant.

Apache 2.0 has a patent grant from my understanding.

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This is all so complicated, and there's so much conjecture and uncertainty from the community. Engineers interpreting legalese is a bad idea. We need impartial lawyers to explain each of these licenses in plain English, including the ramifications and side effects to consider, and put the debate to rest.

This has all been so tiring.

Yup. There’s going to a lot of self congratulation going on in the comments but basically all this has done is remove explicit granting of patents.

Like... ok, great, better really hope you never get into legal issues with FB now

> basically all this has done is remove explicit granting of patents

If that were true, then why would they write all those blog posts saying that the BSD+Patents was "for their protection". They even repeated it here. It's pretty clear that the patent grant was asymmetric, but not in the direction you're suggesting here.

Oh it works both ways. It's the opposite of the Apache 2 grant for example (which is extremely liberal, and I like it) but that's also exactly what you'd expect from many large companies.

There's a reason that BSD/MIT is preferred by companies vs Apache 2 (which has been adopted, yes, but much less). It's because - just like here - it preserves all their patent rights.

So yes, you now have less protection but FB has just the same if not more.

Don't get me wrong: the patents grant wasn't a great solution but it solved specific problems and concerns on both sides that BSD by itself doesn't even try to address and alternatives (like Apache 2) only address half of.

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