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0 pointspluma9y ago0 comments

The "concerns about patent usage" is a tired trope as well.

Yes, if you use React you're basically agreeing not to sue Facebook over patents. Except if Facebook was acting in bad faith they'd probably have enough patents you could be found in violation of to ruin you anyway. If your software is non-trivial, it's already violating patents you probably never even heard of.

But the real kicker is that if you're not using React you're probably already using open source software. And in the JS ecosystem that probably means you're using software under MIT, BSD and ISC licenses, which have no patent provisions whatsoever.

Fun fact: AngularJS uses the MIT license and does NOT contain a patent grant whatsoever. If you use AngularJS, Google can sue you over any patents it holds that are relevant to AngularJS -- they don't even have to wait until you sue them first.

Ember? Same thing (MIT license without patent grant).

jQuery? Although it was dual-licensed as MIT/GPL at some point it's now only MIT-licensed and again contains no patent grant.

In other words: unless you have an explicit patent grant, you're at risk of being sued by the owners of whatever patents you happen to be infringing upon. The only difference is that you're entirely reliant upon the goodwill of the patent owners while React explicitly shields you unless you sue Facebook over patents.

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michel-slm9y ago· 2 in thread

The patent retaliation is more broad than the provision in the Apache license though, which basically only revoke the patent grants for a specific work if you sue over patent infringement in the same work.

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Patent_clauses_in_software_licences...

plumaOP9y ago

Yes, I actually wrote a paragraph on Apache/GPL/MPL patent grants which I deleted before submitting because it's really not relevant to the argument.

React, like most JS projects, is licensed under an MIT/BSD style license (they're too similar to be worth the distinction in this context).

The alternative to having the FB patent grant wouldn't be to have the Apache 2.0 patent grant. It would be having no patent grant, as is the case with AngularJS, Ember and jQuery.

Which is completely beside the most important point: if you don't use React, you might be still affected by React-related patents owned by Facebook and there's no patent grant preventing them from suing you -- and this holds true for all patents owned by everybody else.

The default for JS projects is no patent grant. FB is actually more benign than any of the alternatives by providing a patent grant at all.

Not only is the argument entirely theoretical (If FB doesn't sue you over React patents, they might still sue you over non-React patents or someone else might sue you over React patents FB doesn't hold) but it's also invalid (FB doesn't benefit from offering a patent grant compared to not offering a patent grant -- which would have been the default for open source projects like React).

If you just want to argue that FB could have done more, yes of course they could have. But that's like shouting at someone giving you a free penny why they don't give you a free dollar.

Noseshine9y ago

So I'm suddenly very interested after hearing about this issue. The discussion always seems to be about Facebook suing me, assuming all is fine because why would I sue them?

The problem is the startup I work for relies on patents for a big part. And if we use any Facebook stuff, which I actually wanted to do as the main developer (react and react-native), they can use our stuff without caring about our patents! Because we can't sue them!

So basically, with that license Facebook on the one hand protects itself against patent trolls. Good, fine.

On the other hand though they grant themselves the right to use any patent of any company that uses their products, because you can't sue them any more! No? That's how I read it after having read a lot of discussions, none of which talk about that major issue, because for most people in this discussion defending their own patent(s) against Facebook is not an issue, so the discussion is very heavily one-sided towards people who don't have that problem.

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