Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook open-sources deep-learning modules

research.facebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 76 posts

Re: Facebook open-sources deep-learning modules

#41

Post by mcintyre1994 »

DannyBee wrote: post #27

Sadly, this has facebook's new, horrible patent clause. For those who aren't aware, it says 1. If facebook sues you, and you counterclaim over patents (whether about software or not), you will lose rights under all these patent grants. So essentially you can't defend yourself. This is different than the typical apache style patent grant, which instead would say "if you sue me over patents in apache licensed software…

This does look terrible but I'm not sure about number 2 - can you quote the part of the clause that suggested that?

Re: Facebook open-sources deep-learning modules

#42

Post by SixSigma »

jawns wrote: post #34
DannyBee wrote: post #27

Sadly, this has facebook's new, horrible patent clause. For those who aren't aware, it says 1. If facebook sues you, and you counterclaim over patents (whether about software or not), you will lose rights under all these patent grants. So essentially you can't defend yourself. This is different than the typical apache style patent grant, which instead would say "if you sue me over patents in apache licensed software…

Here's a link to the patent clause: https://github.com/facebook/fbcunn/blob/master/PATENTS DannyBee, I'm having a hard time envisioning what sort of scenario might trigger this, and what the repercussions might be. Any chance you could explain?

> The license granted hereunder will terminate, automatically and without notice, for anyone that makes any claim ... by ... assertion or other action ... alleging .. that any right in any patent claim of Facebook is invalid or unenforceable.

That sounds pretty chilling considering that could mean that anything any of your employees say about any other Facebook patent could wreck your business, if you choose to use Facebook code from Github.

Re: Facebook open-sources deep-learning modules

#43

Post by DannyBee »

jawns wrote: post #34
DannyBee wrote: post #27

Sadly, this has facebook's new, horrible patent clause. For those who aren't aware, it says 1. If facebook sues you, and you counterclaim over patents (whether about software or not), you will lose rights under all these patent grants. So essentially you can't defend yourself. This is different than the typical apache style patent grant, which instead would say "if you sue me over patents in apache licensed software…

Here's a link to the patent clause: https://github.com/facebook/fbcunn/blob/master/PATENTS DannyBee, I'm having a hard time envisioning what sort of scenario might trigger this, and what the repercussions might be. Any chance you could explain?

Do you mean the first part, or the validity provision? as a reply points out, it is incredibly broad.

Assuming you mean the first part (the validity provision seems "obviously bad" to me), let's lay out some scenarios:

You make your important software dependent on this software. Congrats, facebook can now sue you with impunity because you can't afford to lose these patents.

Worse, the fact that they have given you a grant does not prevent them from suing you, and the second you counterclaim, you lose. Note also that the grant specifically does not cover "the Software in combination with any software or other technology provided by you or a third party." So if you take this stuff and run it in a pipeline, and facebook has a patent on running it in a pipeline, you don't get that patent and they can still sue you.

(Again, in the apache case, you'd only ever lose the patent grant if you sued facebook over the software in question).

Ignoring direct cases, facebook can also use this as leverage during acquisitions that use their software (Nice software, shame if you were to lose rights to it), etc.

There are potentially an infinite number of ways to use this kind of stuff.

Also note this kind of thing has been looked at in the past. There is an entire discussion here: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/archive-license/200...

from when v2 of apache license was being written, etc.

There are reasons the Apache grant has become pretty much the standard - most people and corporations find it a pretty good balance of various concerns (being able to defend yourself in patent lawsuits, etc).

What Facebook has done is entirely one-sided. It benefits Facebook only, and even then, it generally only helps them in situations where they want to sue people. None of this really helps defensively. If they wanted it for defense, they'd write it differently to cover defensive situations.

Re: Facebook open-sources deep-learning modules

#44

Post by [deleted] »

amelius wrote: post #35
bpodgursky wrote: post #31

I appreciate that Facebook open-sources their libraries, but they have an awful habit of dumping source code on Github and then continuing to develop it internally without pushing those changes back out. For example, Facebook open-sourced Thrift, then proceeded to develop it internally, and recently released out a fork of thrift, not merging anything back into the original tree. Likewise, they open-sourced Corona a f…

From the article: > We hope that these high-quality code releases will be a catalyst to the research community and we will continue to update them from time to time.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook open-sources deep-learning modules

#45

Post by malnourish »

hueving wrote: post #33
WillNotDownvote wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so ads don't feel like much of the FB experience. My point is that FB seems much, much more focused on creating an engaging user experience than it does on ads, so it seems wrong to say that their deep learning efforts have ads as their one main goal.

What it feels like to the user doesn't matter. They are still maximizing their ad revenue.

What it feels like to the user is vital. The AI is probably to find the most engaging way to display ads. More engagement with ads == high ad valuation.

Re: Facebook open-sources deep-learning modules

#46

Post by WillNotDownvote »

hueving wrote: post #33
WillNotDownvote wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so ads don't feel like much of the FB experience. My point is that FB seems much, much more focused on creating an engaging user experience than it does on ads, so it seems wrong to say that their deep learning efforts have ads as their one main goal.

What it feels like to the user doesn't matter. They are still maximizing their ad revenue.

What does matter is what their primary goal is- Is it to increase user engagement for its own sake (and ad revenue is an incidental necessity), or is it to increase user engagement to maximize their ad revenue?

That is, is the main goal of Facebook to engage and connect people via its platform, or is it to make money from selling ads?

From everything I've seen from them thus far, I just don't believe ad revenue is their main goal. They do seem incredibly obsessive about engagement, but ads seem like a neglected afterthought.

Re: Facebook open-sources deep-learning modules

#47

Post by DannyBee »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #41
DannyBee wrote: post #27

Sadly, this has facebook's new, horrible patent clause. For those who aren't aware, it says 1. If facebook sues you, and you counterclaim over patents (whether about software or not), you will lose rights under all these patent grants. So essentially you can't defend yourself. This is different than the typical apache style patent grant, which instead would say "if you sue me over patents in apache licensed software…

This does look terrible but I'm not sure about number 2 - can you quote the part of the clause that suggested that?

"The license granted hereunder will terminate, automatically and without notice, for anyone that makes any claim (including by filing any lawsuit, assertion or other action) alleging ... (b) that any right in any patent claim of Facebook is invalid or unenforceable."

(the entire rest of the ... is clause (a))

Re: Facebook open-sources deep-learning modules

#48

Post by mcintyre1994 »

DannyBee wrote: post #47
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This does look terrible but I'm not sure about number 2 - can you quote the part of the clause that suggested that?

"The license granted hereunder will terminate, automatically and without notice, for anyone that makes any claim (including by filing any lawsuit, assertion or other action) alleging ... (b) that any right in any patent claim of Facebook is invalid or unenforceable." (the entire rest of the ... is clause (a))

Oops, not sure how I misread that, it's pretty clear! This unfortunately seems to reduce these projects in usefulness to pretty much awesome and interesting research - completely unusable in any business though. I don't see how any business can be expected to make all employees keep to these conditions - way too fragile and easy for an employee to screw the company.

Re: Facebook open-sources deep-learning modules

#49

Post by bitL »

DannyBee wrote: post #27

Sadly, this has facebook's new, horrible patent clause. For those who aren't aware, it says 1. If facebook sues you, and you counterclaim over patents (whether about software or not), you will lose rights under all these patent grants. So essentially you can't defend yourself. This is different than the typical apache style patent grant, which instead would say "if you sue me over patents in apache licensed software…

Does this apply in continental Europe as well? I doubt so. You can't give away your rights via any form of contract.

Re: Facebook open-sources deep-learning modules

#50

Post by chubot »

technologia wrote: post #21

We've been using Torch for a while at work, really appreciate Facebook doing this. Some of us had a hard time adjusting to Lua, but it was well worth it.

I'm curious what your team experience was with Lua.

IIRC, Lua is even more liberal than Python in that if you mistype a variable name, it will silently give you 'nil' rather than throwing an exception.

Also, the prototype system is a little wonky. It seems overly flexible and makes you do too much work yourself, which would make it hard on a large team all getting started at once.

If Torch gets popular I wonder if something like TypeScript or Facebook's own Flow would start to make sense.

Post reply on HN