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Comment by schrep | Hacker News Reader

Actually we just thought it was a shame that people wouldn’t use it because of the license. Not much more complicated than that.

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I believe there charges shows not only well intention but also that Facebook actually cares about and listens to the community, which in the long term is many times more valuable for the ecosystem then this particular change in itself.

Great work!

If they had changed the license when the community asked, that would have been listening to the community, but they didn't.

Changing the license because people are leaving the project only shows that FB cares about itself.

I totally get that view and it bums me out. I can say there is reasoned debate about the different licenses as you can see in this thread. We've changed an explicit patent grant into a debated implicit one. We thought the first was clearer to folks but when debate turned into action we decided winning the debate wasn't important we should just do what would allow people to use the code. I know big companies can look opaque and self-interested on the outside so I get your view. Just sharing as someone part of the internal discussions what happened and why.

I think it's unlikely that Facebook added the PATENTS file in order to make things easier for other companies and not for self-interest. It's an explicit patent revocation, not just grant. If I'm not mistaken, there was backlash against an earlier version of the file as well. Only later they tried to spin it as something they were doing for the public.

You forgot to mention that the explicit grant came with obnoxious conditions, and those conditions were the crux of the issue. Your characterization of the change says a lot about the internal discussions in which you participated.

+1, this debate has been going on for a long while(6mo-1year?).

Claiming that you decided to change it out of the goodness of your heart seems a bit disingenuous. I get if you needed to clear it with the lawyers/business owners over that time but claiming it was changed on a whim doesn't ring true.

I suspect that given Facebook's history with patents it has probably been in the works a long time to make this change.

Someone on Reddit argued that the new legal situation is worse because the PATENTS clause provided protection against litigation unless you sued Facebook first. Licensing under MIT, s/he argued, theoretically opens you up to litigation at any time IF Facebook decides to enforce any patents. So I was wondering: as far as you know, does Facebook have any patents on React or React Native?

Some lawyers think the language used in the MIT license implies a patent grant limited to the use of the licensed software. They think it would be difficult for the licensor to give a license on the software from one hand, and claim a patent infringement on the same software from the other hand, but as far as I know, this was never tested in court.

Not to mention the question that the older language had a perpetual patent license for anyone using the software (subject to termination under the now much-discussed rare circumstance of suing FB).

So long as you were using the software under those conditions, it would be an interesting argument for how that patent license could now be unilaterally rescinded. (The new license doesn't say anything about it.)

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