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Comment by mlsarecmg | Hacker News Reader

Everyone can, that's precisely why they gave you a grant previously. Now that it's gone due to the outcry it's in the same, vague playing field that all other libraries are in. Every project you have ever written infringes on someones IP. The only thing that matters is that lawyers that previously got cold feet can now relax. We had a project for instance that was canceled, now it's being green-lit thanks to the MIT license.

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Actually, there is an (albeit so far untested) implicit patent grant in all-permissive licenses like the MIT. So removing the explicit one-way, revokable patent grant actually implicitly provides a better patent grant.

I'd really like to see that written black on white,though.

The fact that MIT and BSD licensed code (implicit patent impunity) can be re-licensed under the Apache license (explicit patent impunity) is enough evidence for me.

Reference: http://apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-a

What does re-licensed mean? You can’t take mit licensed code and slap a Apache License on it.

You can create a derivative work and license that under Apache.

Not if it uses copyrighted MIT licensed code.

Black and white is not as good as everyone seems to think. There are reasons you don't enumerate every possibility ;) (courts will then interpret that as a complete list, instead of extending it to cover similar situations)

If you had black and white fair use, for example, you'd just be railing against the fact that courts wouldn't extend it to cover new similar thing X.

Black and white is good for establishing baselines in law (IE "these things over here are definitely okay, and everything else should be judged by these factors" It's rarely that great if you are trying to make a license that stands the test of time and march of technology.

react isn't covered by fb patent, so using react grants nothing in terms of fb patents (implied or otherwise).

This is not untested, only untested in the software field. It's very very very well tested in other fields.

So far, every court ever (and there are quite a lot of them) has said "when you tell people they can use your thing and do what they want with it, you can't sue them later for infringement for doing what you said was okay".

There is pretty much zero precedent on the other side.

In fact, one of the only related pieces of precedent on the other side, which was "attempting to avoid patent exhaustion by contract" was completely and totally overruled by the supreme court last year, where they unequivocably said that sales exhaust patents, no matter what you make a person agree to.

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