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Comment by juancampa | Hacker News Reader

I'm not, by any means, a licensing expert but OWFa (the new spec license) has the following termination clause:

> All rights, grants, and promises made by me to you under this Agreement are terminated if you file, maintain, or voluntarily participate in a lawsuit against me or any person or entity asserting that its Permitted Uses infringe any Granted Claims you would have had the right to enforce had you signed this Agreement, unless that suit was in response to a corresponding suit first brought against you

Wasn't this the problem with the previous BSD + patents license? Not criticizing by any means, I'm genuinely curious.

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It's important to note the difference between the specification (now licensed under OWFa) and the implementations (now licensed under MIT).

GraphQL.js and Relay are now basically in the same situation as React. The GraphQL specification however is more general and needs the Patents around it to be specifically granted. The above doesn't do anything but say "if you sue specifically over the rights granted herein then we'll revoke" but that's nothing like as broad as the problematic Patent grant was.

The "...Granted Claims you would have had the right to enforce..." seems to limit the claim to stuff related to GraphQL.

The license is certainly unclear from a layman's perspective.

The text specifically defines "Granted Claims" as "those patent claims that I own or control [...] that are infringed by Permitted Uses." And "I" refers only to the entity granting the patent rights.

So how does "Granted Claims you would have had the right to enforce" make any sense? Does it only apply to co-owners of the patent rights, or something like that?

> The license is certainly unclear from a layman's perspective.

If that's your standard then you'll either be using PD or leaving yourself up to your ears in very very risky code. Most laymen won't understand the full legal implications of something as simple as the BSD licence.

So it's not about any lawsuit, but one (brought up by you etc.) that related to infringement because of being permitted to use (the GraphQL spec).

That seems to mean if there's a lawsuit with the concerned company, but not related to the permitted use of GraphQL spec, no termination then.

Not a lawyer, though.

There are a lot of "good" OSS licenses that have a similar terms - I've noted this elsewhere (re: the CDDL) and haven't gotten an answer.

+1 to someone who knows the legal side and can differentiate for laypersons, since the text looks awfully similar between many of these.

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