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Explaining React's license

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Re: Explaining React's license

#121

Post by jaredklewis »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #107
jaredklewis wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would patiently beg everyone to employ some basic reasoning. Situation A: React is licensed under BSD + PATENTS. You sue Facebook for infringing your widget patent. Turns out Facebook has a patent for something in react. They revoke your grant and counter sue you for infringing that patent. Long legal battle ensues. Situation A: React is licensed under just BSD. You sue Facebook for infringing your widget patent. T…

People are worried about Situation C: React is licensed under BSD + PATENTS. You sue Facebook (or any corporate affiliate of theirs) for infringing on your widget patent. Facebook revokes your react license and counter sues you for copyright infringement. The patents clause doesn't have anything to do with any patents on parts of React. It's a way for Facebook to make it so that anyone who wants to sue them for paten…

Situation C is identical to situation A and B. You sue Facebook (or any affiliate) and Facebook counter sues you.

You get counter sued whether or not there is a PATENTS file.

Re: Explaining React's license

#122

Post by devdoomari »

chii wrote: post #119
jnbiche wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the fact that if you sue Facebook for any patent infringement, even a legitimate one (say, you're the creator of some new hardware), Facebook will revoke your React license. Also, Facebook has no vdom patent. It's not like you can be granted a secret, hidden patent (even the word "patent" itself means "open").

> Facebook will revoke your React license. you mean their patent grant? How can an open source license like apache, MIT or bsd be "revoked"? Do facebook have a public blacklist of people who aren't allowed to use react?

um... because it's they can? I can make a library with MIT license to everyone else but you.

MIT and BSD licenses merely provide short-cuts to understanding a project's licensing

Re: Explaining React's license

#123

Post by cbuq »

kbenson wrote: post #109
cbuq wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They need to stop referring to React as open source software. This is proprietary source code. > We believe that if this license were widely adopted, it could actually reduce meritless litigation for all adopters, and we want to work with others to explore this possibility. They do not give a pathway for litigation with merit. This is a patent weapon.

No company assumes a meritorious lawsuit against them exists. Planning for it is ridiculous. Don't take that as a defense of this type of license though.

I agree, in a perfect word, I could take Facebook's word that "We respect third party IP, including patents, and expect others to respect our IP too."

I just can't unsee the way this theoretically could allow Facebook to partake in patent infringement without fear of retribution.

Re: Explaining React's license

#124

Post by bdcravens »

Xoros wrote: post #111
bdcravens wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see it as "released". It's just the closing of a Github issue, not a press release. Do you feel that if a company is "evil", do you feel there's a moral imperative to not use their products? It seems to me there's a lot of "But React!" going on.

The post linked is from 4 hours ago. So yes it's a late Friday statement. https://code.facebook.com/posts/112130496157735/explaining-r...

I think the linked URL has changed - before I thought it was to the Github issue.

Re: Explaining React's license

#125

Post by spacetexas »

jaredklewis wrote: post #105
eridius wrote: post #35

> We've been looking for ways around this and have reached out to ASF to see if we could try to work with them, but have come up empty. There's a pretty obvious solution to this: relicense React. The fact that Facebook isn't even considering that is a pretty strong indication that they "weaponized" their license on purpose. > To this point, though, we haven't done a good job of explaining the reasons behind our BSD +…

I would patiently beg everyone to employ some basic reasoning. Situation A: React is licensed under BSD + PATENTS. You sue Facebook for infringing your widget patent. Turns out Facebook has a patent for something in react. They revoke your grant and counter sue you for infringing that patent. Long legal battle ensues. Situation A: React is licensed under just BSD. You sue Facebook for infringing your widget patent. T…

Not sure why you think that Facebook can claim patents on BSD licensed software without specific identification. Your second situation can't occur.

The problem is that in the case you have a legitimate claim against Facebook they always have an 'out' if you have significant React use in your org.

Re: Explaining React's license

#126

Post by lobster_johnson »

hajile wrote: post #117
kevinflo wrote: post #101

I love love love love love react as a technology, but this is just awful. I believe any developer not on Facebook's payroll still contributing to React or React native at this point has a moral obligation to stop. I personally feel like such a fool for not taking all this seriously before the ASF gave me a wakeup call. React is a trojan horse into the open source community that Facebook purposely and maliciously stee…

https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/0.11-stable/LICENSE Turns out that forking a somewhat recent version of React that uses Apache is possible while still retaining any relevant patents (esp pending vdom patents) and API compatibility.

0.11 is three years old, though. Not really recent.

Re: Explaining React's license

#127

Post by spacetexas »

jnbiche wrote: post #100
Lazare wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Facebook has a patent on React, it's almost certainly going to be on the vdom concept. If Facebook has a patent on the vdom, then all the projects in your list violate the patent, and none of them come with even a conditional patent grant from Facebook. If Facebook does not have a patent on the vdom or other React technology, then those other projects are safe, but so is React , since termination of the patent gra…

You're missing the fact that if you sue Facebook for any patent infringement, even a legitimate one (say, you're the creator of some new hardware), Facebook will revoke your React license. Also, Facebook has no vdom patent. It's not like you can be granted a secret, hidden patent (even the word "patent" itself means "open").

The BSD license doesn't allow future revocation in itself. They can make a new version with a different license but not for old versions.

Re: Explaining React's license

#128

Post by pdfernhout »

pdfernhout wrote: post #120
Lazare wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Facebook has a patent on React, it's almost certainly going to be on the vdom concept. If Facebook has a patent on the vdom, then all the projects in your list violate the patent, and none of them come with even a conditional patent grant from Facebook. If Facebook does not have a patent on the vdom or other React technology, then those other projects are safe, but so is React , since termination of the patent gra…

It's speculation what patents Facebook has for React or what they cover. I've heard of claims of prior art for vdom-like concepts, so it is possible even if Facebook has React-related patents, only narrower interpretations of any claims might hold up (if that). React has a specific way of updating state which, for example, Mithril does not use. So, it is possible other vdoms may be far enough away from React to not b…

Here is a prior art reference by erichocean: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14784983 "To anyone concerned about React's virtual DOM and diff'ing stuff, and a potential Facebook patent thereof, in early 2012 I wrote and published (under a GLPv3 license) a virtual DOM implementation with efficient diff'ing when I forked SproutCore[0] to become Blossom.[1]"

Re: Explaining React's license

#129

Post by antoncohen »

Facebook's license is no more dangerous than regular MIT or BSD-style licenses. If you are OK with using MIT or BSD licensed software you should be OK with using Facebook's BSD + Patents software.

Here is why:

MIT and BSD licenses don't have any patent grants, unlike the Apache 2.0 license. If you use MIT/BSD open source software, and some functionality of that software is patented by the author, you could be sued for patent infringement.

If you use software licensed under Facebook's BSD + Patents license, and the author of the software (Facebook) has patented technology in the software (which AFAIK they don't), the author CANNOT sue you.

Now if you turn around and use the author for patent infringement for something else, you lose the patent grant that came with the software, and you are back to a normal plain old BSD license.

The BSD + Patents license is strictly better than the regular BSD/MIT licenses. You lose no rights, you may gain some patent protection.

Major software like Ruby (BSD), Rails (MIT), and FreeBSD (BSD) use licenses without patent grants. Entire businesses are built on top of these pieces of software, e.g., GitHub (Ruby and Rails) and a lot of commercial hardware built on FreeBSD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Free...).

Read the patent grant for yourself:

https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/PATENTS

Re: Explaining React's license

#130

Post by chii »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #8
throwgoog452 wrote: post #7

People used to say that the GPL was illegal, unacceptable, immoral, and all sorts of other things. Then, gradually, everyone started using it, and copyleft became an acceptable software licensing strategy. I hope that BSD + Patents also achieves gradual acceptability.

People started using the GPL because it works fine for software that isn't distributed to consumers, e.g. on servers. Those uses have subverted the entire intent of he license, however.

> Those uses have subverted the entire intent of the license

You're reading too much into the intent of the license. GPLv2 being used on servers is a valid use case.

Tivoization is indeed subverting the intent of GPLv2, which is one of the reason for GPLv3. But in the case of Tivoization, you _are_ distributing the code to end users, rather than just running it on their behalf, and hence, in my eyes, violates the intent of GPL (that end users you distribute your software to should be allowed to modify the software).

Hosted software isn't like tivoization, in that the host doesn't distribute, and so no GPL issues whatsoever.

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