On React and WordPress

There is no precedent for BSD/MIT implying any patent grant.

So in other words it's only the chance of an implicit patent grant, which may or may not actually hold up.

In fact, this entire argument is backwards. React is licensed under the BSD license and comes with an additional patent grant. If the BSD license would imply any patent grant, the additional patent grant would only count on top of that so the FB patent grant would actually be irrelevant. If that's not the case, there is evidently no implicit patent grant in the BSD license. You can't have it both ways.

> > This point is irrelevant even granting the assumption that it does. You're inspecting the wording of the patent grant and gauging whether it is theoretically effective in deterring patent litigation and thereby conferring some kind of benefit to users of the software is (correct?).

You are also talking about the irrelevant stuff here.

I have no doubt Apache is a better license. But what Facebook is doing is by no means something new.

The law is more about precedent than logic. Unless you can point to specific opinions from lawyers or judges on this, this sounds more like your opinion than any kind of proof.

At issue is that Facebook putting both the License file and the PATENTS file in the same repository seems to many people like an overt act that extinguishes any implicit patent grant in the same way the "Clear BSD" license does (although a difference there is a modified license file). It feels to me like like Facebook is trying to have it both ways -- seeming to be a good citizen in the free and open source community but at the same time creating a one-sided deal with extra conditions. If they wanted to be unambiguous, they could have used the Clear BSD license and then added the PATENTS file.

> I've seen plenty of real lawyers agree.

Links?

For reference, here is an opinion from an actual US Patent lawyer citing actual US legal judgement about implied patent licenses implying how an implicit grant in this case would be broader in scope than the explicit Facebook PATENTS license: http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Implicit_patent_licence

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In 2005, Dan Ravicher explained that, in the USA, recipients of software under the GNU GPL version 2 receive an implicied patent grant, based on the following US case law.

De Forest Radio, 273 U.S. 236 (1927) "No formal granting of a license is necessary in order to give it effect. Any language used by the owner of the patent, or any conduct on his part exhibited to another from which that other may properly infer that the owner consents to his use of the patent in making or using it, or selling it, upon which the other acts, constitutes a license.”"

Hewlett - Packard Co. v . Repeat - O-Type Stencil Mfg. Corp. , Inc., 123 F. 3d 1445 (Fed. Cir. 1997). "Generally, when a seller sells a product without restriction, it in effect promises the purchaser that in exchange for the price paid, it will not interfere with the purchaser's full enjoyment of the product purchased. The buyer has an implied license under any patents of the seller that dominate the product or any uses of the product to which the parties might reasonably contemplate the product will be put."

Bottom Line Mgmt., Inc. v. Pan Man, Inc., 228 F. 3d 1352 (Fed. Cir. 2000) "Unless the parties provide otherwise, the purchaser of a patented article has an implied license not only to use and sell it, but also to repair it to enable it to function properly. This implied license covers both the original purchaser of the article and all subsequent purchasers."

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Still this does not address the issue of an explicit grant extinguishing an implicit grant. It seems like that may still need to be tested in court. The practical issue then is, why bet your company on an unknown like that when there are perfectly acceptable alternative UI libraries (even better ones technically like Mithril, Inferno, and so on)?