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Hi, Paul from the React team here. There have been lots of questions about the license+patents combo we use. Recently our legal team answered some of those questions. https://code.facebook.com/license-faq
The way I read it, it's not evil. It's a known and deliberate shortcoming of many licenses (e.g. BSD) not to include patent stuff because it makes everything unnecessarily complex. There was recently an article about why BSD and MIT are so popular, and it's because they're concise and understandable. There is a reason WTFPL exists and some developers resort to it as a way to avoid legalese. Facebook clearly was aware…
I think you should read the article again. What it argues is that the licence essentially means that you can't initiate a lawsuit against FB for infringing one of your patents (which may have nothing to do with Reaft) without losing your React licence. Now whether that bothers you or not depends on your individual circumstances and the sanity of your particular legal jurisdiction, but it certainly would be something…
If the revocation clause were broader, say, invoked for any patent suit against any contributor or user of the software, even better. That might fall afoul of antitrust or similar type restrictions, a not-uncommon problem with patent pooling type measures from what I've read and been told over the years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the argument is that the grant is asymmetric. GPL is "I open up, you open up". The retaliation clause Facebook uses is "you don't get to sue us, but we may sue you".
That's an interesting argument! (But the article didn't make it..) Couldn't you argue that the GPL says "you don't get to keep your changes private, but I do", and so is asymmetric too? It seems normal to me for the rightsholder to retain more rights than the grantee.
But the problem with Facebook's license is not the copyright, it's the patent grant.
If I sue facebook and they countersue, then my defense is simply "i am licensed under BSD". The fact that you offered an additional license (they even call it "additional") does not mean that I am required to accept it when the first license stands alone.
Right?
The way I read it, it's not evil. It's a known and deliberate shortcoming of many licenses (e.g. BSD) not to include patent stuff because it makes everything unnecessarily complex. There was recently an article about why BSD and MIT are so popular, and it's because they're concise and understandable. There is a reason WTFPL exists and some developers resort to it as a way to avoid legalese. Facebook clearly was aware…
True, the BSD License does not explicitly state
that the licensee receives the right to use the
licensed software under the licensor’s patents. But
I’ve never heard any lawyer postulate that that
document does not grant a license to fully exploit the
licensed software under all of the licensor’s
intellectual property. Anyone who pushes that view is
thinking too hard.Earlier quoted context omitted.
You will notice that most new projects all use MIT. Apache 2 hasn't been used for anything new in the last year+.
Have some examples? The MIT license is problematic with software patents. I see some projects moving to Apache2 for that reason (one prominent example here is Rust. They moved to an MIT/Apache2 dual licensing model).
I could have found more, but its a big org. Any examples I found that used other licenses where that way because they where related to something else that used a previous license (i.e. all TypeScript stuff is Apache2, hence any new TS is still be Apache2 for consistency).
React.js is basically licensed so that you cannot make anything that can compete with facebook corporation. Example: 1. You create something similar to Instagram using React. 2. It gets popular 3. Facebook sues you and takes all your reacts and reducers
Yes it would totally make sense for facebook to effectively kill react (wasting millions of their paid engineering hours) and forever taint their developer community by using that clause to sue another company just because they compete. Hypothetically if you ever grow so big and frighten facebook to that degree, migrating off react would be an easy problem to solve.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft is not necessarily a paragon of open source, but many of their open source projects use unadulterated OS licenses. Typescript is Apache 2: https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/blob/master/LICENSE.... Visual Studio Code is MIT: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/blob/master/LICENSE.txt
Apple and Facebook have "strong" patent retaliation clauses while Microsoft has a "weak" patent retaliation clause. More on strong vs weak retaliation clauses here: http://www.rosenlaw.com/lj9.htm Can't believe Microsoft is the good guy here.
I agree. I was working at a somewhat large IT company (~30k employees) this year. I made a plea for React and while our development section agreed, it got bounced by legal because of these points. If Facebook is really serious about Open Source, they also have to make their licence so that every organisation is free to use it.
It's the opposite, actually: the original copyleft licenses such as the GPL were explicitly designed to promote Open Source by hindering adoption in some cases, namely those where companies want to distribute derivative works commercially.
Then the BSD/MIT-style licenses weakened this restriction. So you're free to use React in a commercial product.
But Facebook, Apple etc. care a lot about patents these days. Not offensively, as far as we can tell, but they have now been burned repeatedly by often trivial patents being used to extract hundreds of million from them.
So they added these 'patentleft' clauses to their licenses to essentially undermine the patent system in regards to software. As it gets more difficult to build anything without some library that includes this clause, fewer and fewer actors will have the freedom to sue without consequences.
Being opposed to patents on intellectual property in the first case, I can only applaud these efforts. In fact, they should probably go further and extend the protection to everyone: If you use IP patents against Jane Doe, you may no longer use React.
The only problem is the rise of entities focused entirely on patent-litigation.