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Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js

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Re: Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js

#321

Post by Sacho »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #151

IANAL, but here's an ominous scenario: There is no patent clause now. Assuming some FB patent has crept its way in one of their open source, if a company sues FB for patent infringement, FB would be able to counter-sue for copyright infringement due to the suing company's use of FB's open source. "As long as you don't sue us, we won't sue you" kind of a deal. If the above scenario is true, it seems there is no de fac…

Why would Facebook sue for copyright infringement? Suing them for patent infringement doesn't invalidate the copyright - not for BSD+PATENTS, and certainly not for MIT. Your scenario doesn't make sense.

Re: Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js

#322

Post by abritinthebay »

jjnoakes wrote: post #296
abritinthebay wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Implicit grants have very little case law and what law there is doesn't look too useful for people in this case (the patent(s) would have to be extremely specifically applicable to the code, which most patents are designed not to be). So I trust implicit grants much less than explicit.

Right, if they were equal grants, I would too. But they aren't, that's the point.

It's a principled stand for sure, and I can respect that, but it also means that in practice you get less protection.

Like, I'd love to live in a world where patent protection wasn't even an issue but we don't. So in this situation we end up with less protection due to compatibility concerns.

Given we do live in a world where software patents are valuable to companies and they won't all want to give blanket irrevocable licenses... there has to be a way for business to do that and protect users of the software.

The patent grant FB did was a (flawed) attempt at that.

Re: Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js

#323

Post by marksomnian »

Rapzid wrote: post #248
davidgerard wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quarter of all websites? An exodus.

Those websites weren't leaving, they never arrived..

They were close to arriving but they backtracked, all 25% of them. I'd call that an exodus before you even arrive.

Re: Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js

#324

Post by arca_vorago »

jakobegger wrote: post #320
arca_vorago wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Please tell me more about commercial sales of GPL software. How could I make sure that people pay me for using my desktop app if it was GPL?

A common misconception is that under GPL all your code must be released to the public. This is not true. You only have to give code to the user after purchase. Now, it's true that the user could then upload your software to the public (under gpl), but many of the issues surrounding that (such as lost sales #) aren't as bad as people imagine they are, and in the foss world are generally made up for by high-maintainence intervals (so forks would be behind feature-wise), and support/service contracts to augment the traditional sales model. (Redhat model)

Re: Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js

#325

Post by Sacho »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #273
abiox wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FB would be able to counter-sue for copyright infringement due to the suing company's use of FB's open source the whole point of mit/bsd/etc is copyright grant. fb can only realistically win a suit wrt infringement if they revoke the mit/bsd license first (not sure if this is possible...not sure if it's even been tried before).

Revoking a license retroactively is not possible. But since there is no patent grant with the MIT license, using the open source software is–potentially–open to patent litigation. I don’t think this has been tested in court yet.

The GPLv2 for example asserts that it provides a permissive patent grant under the "implied license" doctrine in patent law - https://copyleft.org/guide-next/comprehensive-gpl-guidech7.h...

But you're right, I don't think it's been exhaustively tested in court, just like most software patent issues.

Re: Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js

#326

Post by chrisco255 »

irrational wrote: post #182
chrisco255 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well...now back to writing code and shipping things...we can all put our irrational fantasies of patent litigation and being "unacquirable" startups due to React to rest.

It's not irrational when your companies lawyers say that you many not use React due to the licensing, and there is a very real chance you will be terminated if you do. Unless you mean that lawyers are irrational, in which case I would agree (throwing in judges and politicians and anyone else in the legal profession while we are at it).

With the old patents license, you had to be the one to initiate patent litigation with Facebook. The odds of needing to and wanting to get into patent litigation with Facebook are way less than 1%. That's an irrational fear. If something has a 1:100,000 chance of impacting you...I dunno man, when it comes to startups I can think of 1000 other things more likely to affect you. Companies that didn't even have patents were getting up in arms about this. It was quite a bit of irrational FUD. Even Wordpress's lawyer didn't have a problem with the license. They were just tired of fending off the FUD from their user base.

Re: Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js

#328

Post by chrisco255 »

rhizome wrote: post #306
dsacco wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for that clarification. I interpreted that paragraph to be somewhat contradictory (“we like this but we’re moving away from it because it’s not our job to convince people it’s fine”). Your interpretation makes more sense and provides better color to it.

Yes. The way I read it, Facebook essentially shirked the issue, regardless whether it's only a perception problem, onto companies like Wordpress. WP has their own users, it's not WP's job to do FB's work for them, and FB has to have known the patents clause was going to be problematic, or at least controversial.

React has been out for 4 years now. This hasn't been this big of a deal. But I guess at this point, React has hit critical mass, and it's sort of becoming a standard for front end development, so the FUD hit fever pitch.

Re: Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js

#329

Post by chrisco255 »

samirillian wrote: post #249
damosneeze wrote: post #37

Thank you, Wordpress.[1] [1] https://ma.tt/2017/09/on-react-and-wordpress/

Though I am a bit curious about why WordPress would need React in the first place. It's not like they're building a real-time app. Am I missing something here?

React has the largest front end ecosystem short of JQuery. And it's a great declarative way of describing UI.

Re: Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js

#330

Post by chrisco255 »

rdiddly wrote: post #202
lelandbatey wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh sure, a framework used on a quarter of the web might have had something to do with it, but actually it was my Hacker News comment the day after the Wordpress news, that put the final, decisive nail in the coffin. It captured so many people's hearts and minds, it ended up with seven upvotes ...and still counting. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Yup, 7. You're welcome everybody! And thanks for the assist, Wordpress! https://ne…

Hacker News does have an impact. Not any one person, but thanks to HN, things like this go viral in the tech community pretty fast.
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