311–320 of 528 posts
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> Because their licence gave Facebook the upper hand if they wanted to come after you. No it didn't. Facebook made a nothing-up-the-sleeve showing; you had recourse if they decided to "come after you", because your right to countersue was something that was explicitly protected in the PATENTS grant. Removing the grant, on the other hand, contributes to a world where everyone else can come after you. That should be sc…
I work for a company with at least one lawyer dedicated to IP law and we thought about this long and hard. What it does is potentially make t prohibitive to sue FB if they violate our patents. Since we have hardware patents and they have hardware, it was distinctly possible that this could be a real problem. We decided to proceed anyway but we know we are risking something. And you can say patents suck and we shouldn…
http://www.businessinsider.com/just-so-were-clear-facebook-t...
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I doubt it was related. The wheels to get this in motion must have started months in advanced, probably around the time ASF started advising against this license (labeling at as Category-X [1]) [1] https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-x
Shot callers; they exist. Lawyers don't actually control these companies, they just have a wide berth.
Can someone explain to me why this is better? Can't Facebook now sue anyone for using their patents?
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In a statement from Facebook on August 18th, 33 days ago[0]: We have considered possible changes carefully, but we won't be changing our default license or React's license at this time. We recognize that we may lose some React community members because of this decision. We are sorry for that, but we need to balance our desire to participate in open source with our desire to protect ourselves from costly litigation. G…
If I had to speculate, I'd suspect that even though they reaffirmed the BSD+Patent license publicly, FB probably started exploring the possibility of relicensing the projects shortly after that. Not to say WP saying they wont use react didn't help, but I don't think it was the "tipping" point for them at all. Legal matters at big companies generally take months to resolve and come to consensus over. I can easily imag…
If I had to speculate, I'd say they did a ton of research on existing licenses on the route to BSD+Patent, and they already knew what the best alternative would be if it came to that.
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It's actually a common policy when it comes to patents. If you are found to infringe on a patent and it can be shown that you knew about it, the penalties are much harsher. This is one of the many reasons people consider the patent system to be badly broken.
Is there no similar penalty for intentionally foregoing due diligence specifically to avoid harsher penalties?
Example: There is a patent in the US on ordering food from a menu online. It's held by a NPE (aka, a patent troll), and they charge a fairly high license fee. Some people who offer online ordering to restaurants pay the license fee; others don't. If you don't pay, then you can afford to charge lower prices than your competitors. If you do pay, then it's in your interests to tell everyone you meet about the patent, because every person you tell is someone who now faces triple damages if they opt to use on your your non-paying competitors.
Let me say that again, because it's so crazy: Some companies actually advertise their high prices, because a potential customer just reading their pricing page can thereafter no longer opt for a lower priced competitor without being subject to increased damages.
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React 16 will be licensed under MIT. Previous versions of React which you may be using under BSD+patents will remain licensed under BSD+patents. If you upgrade to 16, you should be free and clear of the patents clause. Definitely not PR theater. (IANAL, but this is how relicensing works basically universally)
But my understanding is that some patent grant is better than no patent grant. The controversy was about the termination clause favouring Facebook, but it’s still better than not having it. Surely the only true solution would have been to switch to a license that has a more liberal patent grant, eg Apache 2?
I don't think much around patents and software is settled, partly because of the reluctance of big players to use software patents.
This is a very smart move by Facebook, and a win for the open source community as a whole. Why it took so long for the license change is a bit of a mystery, but removing the complications of software patents from their licenses will help further drive adoption and remove the precedent they were in danger of setting.
> Why it took so long for the license change is a bit of a mystery Have you ever worked at a large company with its own legal team? It's not such a large mystery.
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Wordpress has a pretty good JSON api that you can use with crud operations: https://wordpress.org/plugins/rest-api/ There's also already a theme that uses React: https://themes.redradar.net/foxhound/ With those two things you could build a pretty good web app. The only thing is you'd be in WordPress land and isn't glamorous.
> Wordpress has a pretty good JSON api that you can use with crud operations: https://wordpress.org/plugins/rest-api/ FYI: this shipped in WordPress 4.7 as part of the core software, and is now available on every WordPress site. (e.g. https://www.wired.com/wp-json/ ) > The only thing is you'd be in WordPress land and isn't glamorous. We tried to shield REST API users from much of the nastiness of WordPress' backwards…
So which FB project still have a BSD+patents license. I count: * ReasonML - https://github.com/facebook/reason/blob/master/PATENTS.txt * GraphQL - https://github.com/graphql/graphql-js/blob/master/PATENTS * react-native - https://github.com/facebook/react-native/blob/master/PATENTS * PlanOut - https://github.com/facebook/planout/blob/master/PATENTS * Flow - https://github.com/facebook/flow/blob/master/PATENTS * Haxl…
I've been trying to tell everyone licensing is more important than they realize, but there are so many people who fundamentally misunderstand licensing and therefor just don't care (dwtfyw license for example), or have falsely been trained by subpar instructors at uni and $othertraining about how bsd/mit is the superior license for business because $reasons. The four freedoms and free software solve so many of the pr…