Apache Foundation disallows use of the Facebook “BSD+Patent” license

The line "A year has passed, but searching patents with 'facebook compression' suggests no patent application regarding ZSTD has been filled" is not very convincing to me for a few reasons, primarily that the word "compression" may not show up at all in the patent document. When I got the text of the patent application back from the lawyers, after describing to them in engineering terms the thing we'd invented, I could hardly understand what it was talking about. Patentese is its own dialect of English, and there's no reason to assume that it'll say in straightforward terms that it's a compression algorithm.

To use React, you give Facebook permission to use any of your software patents (edit: all patents, even on a new jet engine) throughout your whole company. Facebook gives you permission to use only the software patents necessary for React.

If your company sues Facebook over an unrelated software patent (edit: as above, any patent), your React license (to the React patents) is pulled and if your business has any dependency on React that part of your business is broken until you can port to something else, or you are in license violation if you keep using it.

On the other hand, if Facebook sues you over a software patent (edit: any patent) that isn't related to React, they are still free to do so (edit: you become free to defensively sue with other patents in response and not lose your license to React patents, meaning with the nuclear analogy below you give Facebook "first strike" capabilities but are allowed to keep a retaliatory-only arsenal).

So there is a big asymmetry: all of your software patents for a few of ours. (edit: all of your patents for a few react software patents)

It's a nuclear arms reduction agreement where Facebook gives up 1% of nukes in exchange for co-signers giving up 100%.

(edit: as pointed out below, it is a much worse deal: you give up all patents on everything, not just software patents; Facebook only gives up software patents on React)

Apache 2.0

> 3. Grant of Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted. 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.

The important bit being...

> 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.

But what people seem to be missing (as far as I can tell) is that you don't lose the licence to use the software. You just lose the patent grants. But with the BSD licence alone, you lose both the patent grand AND the licence. I really don't see how the Apache 2.0 License and Facebook's BSD+Patent Grant are any different.