Am I missing something or does this make zero sense?
https://www.wilmerhale.com/pages/publicationsandnewsdetail.a...
https://copyleft.org/guide/comprehensive-gpl-guidech7.html
Basically, if you sell or license a product that requires a patent to work, courts have generally held that you grant an implied patent license for any patents that the product might require. If you explicitly reference patents within the license, however, then whatever terms you explicitly write into the license supersede this implied patent license. BSD+patents (and Apache 2) have explicit patent language; paradoxically, this makes them more restrictive than licenses like MIT, BSD, or GPL that don't mention patents at all.
React Patent Grant Version 2: https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/b8ba8c83f318b84e42933...
The license granted hereunder will terminate, automatically and without notice, if you (or any of your subsidiaries, corporate affiliates or agents) initiate directly or indirectly, or take a direct financial interest in, any Patent Assertion: (i) against Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or corporate affiliates, (ii) against any party if such Patent Assertion arises in whole or in part from any software, technology, product or service of Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or corporate affiliates, or (iii) against any party relating to the Software.
Apache 2 Section 3: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.
GPL 3 Section 10 (See also Section 11): https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html
You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License. For example, you may not impose a license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of rights granted under this License, and you may not initiate litigation (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any patent claim is infringed by making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the Program or any portion of it.
Edited for spacing
So Facebook's idea works fine if you believe that Patents as a Thing are bad (all patents, not just software patents), and should not be asserted under any circumstances, and it's fine for Facebook to arbitrarily violate any patent of any company who has become dependent on React.
Maybe, maybe not. You suing them over your patent would terminate you patent* license from Facebook, but not your copyright license. Whether that fucks you or not depends on whether or not you actually NEED a patent license from Facebook.
As far as I know, no one has actually found a Facebook patent that covers React.
This would make Reacts PATENTS file a bluff (nothing to grant or revoke). I don't think many companies would be eager to base decisions on that legal theory.
Also, I'm curious. When did React start using the techniques covered in that patent application?
No, if you try to sue them for violating that patent, they can try to sue you for using React - if they actually have valid patents that cover React, that is. I doubt IBM's lawyers are breaking a sweat.
Why do you keep spreading FUD about this stuff even after Facebook withdraws the license?
If implicit patent grants are a thing, why have more modern licenses like Apache 2 and GPL 3 made it a point to include explicit patents grants in the language of the license?
Wouldn’t their legal counsel advise them against it if it was redundant?
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.
Apache 2.0 would have also been acceptable, as it had a better explicit patent grant. I'm actually a little surprised they didn't choose it.
- Explicit patent license specifies why / how it can be revoked.
- Without an explicit patent license, patent infringement case (by Facebook) against a party that uses Facebook's OSS would be become harder, because one may argue that such grant is implied by Facebook open sourcing the software.
That combined with the implied licenses means there was a patent clause causing a ton of unecessary hand-wringing.
The reality is every company of FB's size is patenting every developer's latest dump if it can get through the patent office.
I'm likely oversimplifying, but that's about as much as I understand on licenses