The way I read it, it's not evil.<p>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.<p>Facebook clearly was aware of this "shortcoming" and being a big player, they might have wanted to be nice and say "we won't sue you for patent infringement if it turns out we have a patent on something React does". Then the managers went "but what if they sue us? Patents are not only for offense but also our defense, we would weaken our defense." And so the clause of "except if you sue us first" came into being.<p>And now this fuss about the patent part making it not an open source license? Oh come on.<p>I really don't like Facebook as a company, but this bickering is silly.
Version 2 of the Apple Public Source License includes the following termination clause:<p>12.1 Termination. This License and the rights granted hereunder will terminate:<p>…<p>(c) automatically without notice from Apple if You, at any time during the term of this License, commence an action for patent infringement against Apple; provided that Apple did not first commence an action for patent infringement against You in that instance.<p>Like the React patent grant, this applies to <i>any</i> patent suit, not just ones that allege that the covered software infringes. The Open Source Initiative considers APSLv2 an Open Source license, and the Free Software Foundation considers it a Free Software license. Note that this clause terminates your <i>copyright</i> license, not merely your patent license - it's significantly stronger than the React rider.<p>So I think the claim that it's not open source is a bit strong, even though I find this sort of language pretty repugnant.
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.<p><a href="https://code.facebook.com/license-faq" rel="nofollow">https://code.facebook.com/license-faq</a>
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.<p>If Facebook is really serious about Open Source, they also have to make their licence so that every organisation is free to use it.
So, assuming you actually have a patent, and Facebook actually decides to infringe on that patent, the worst case scenario is that you lose your license to use React. There are principles of fairness and equity in the law that would allow you to stop using React in a reasonable amount of time. So write your frontend in Elm. It probably needed a rewrite anyways.
After <i>Alice v. CLS</i>, what patents about React could be enforced?<p>edit: After Alice there has been a software patent massacre: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_United_States_patent_law#Post-Alice_period" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_United_...</a>
Facebook's license is even weaker than a BSD/MIT license without any PATENTS license attached at all. Because in that case the patents grant can be considered <i>implicit</i>, depending on jurisdiction. By including a PATENTS license in that repository, Facebook nullifies the possibility of such a defense.
While we are on the subject:<p>I constantly find the need to read up on licensing. Usually with various blog posts or online information, which never gives me the feeling that I fully understood the legal implications or the context.<p>Can anyone recommend a book covering software licenses in depth? (ideally not only US centric)
These conspiracy theories are really getting old.<p>Do people really think Facebook developed and released React for the sole, or even primary purpose of gaining patent rights? It's preposterous that so many top engineers would be working on such a goal.<p>It seems obvious that Facebook just has some overly cautious lawyers. I highly doubt that means Facebook is going to use your usage of React as an excuse to steal your patents.
If companies fear that if they try to enforce their patents they will lose access to significant commercial opportunities as a result of not being able to use projects such as react...<p>...basically, I welcome it.<p>Patents are harmful.<p>The FSF has, to my knowledge, made no meaningful progress in significant patent reform.<p>If this helps, then bring it on.
I worked with a development manager headhunted from Microsoft, who was quite worried about simple "Taint" from open source software (i.e. ideas gained from viewing open source code making their way into closed source software). I also worked with a company which wouldn't accept code contributions to their OS project; they would do clean room implementations to avoid the legal hassle of incorporating code which wasn't written for hire. So I can certainly see large companies being leery of utilizing software with licenses which don't include patent grants.<p>Perhaps it's less of an issue with the BSD style licenses, as explicitly called out in the article.
To me it's the GPL of patents; it's a viral anti-patent license. Once you use React you must disarm in the destructive patent wars. I wish more popular software were released with it.
If it becomes a problem, you could drop in a react-compatible library pretty quickly. React native might be tougher but still would probably appear if there was a case with a lot of publicity.
"It is unknown to me why Facebook issued an Additional Grant of Patent Rights in the first place."<p>STOP RIGHT THERE<p>If you can't be bothered to do the research necessary to see why then your JD didn't teach ya much in the ways of learning about things. Which ideally should be a large portion, those big books of case law, now oft replaced with speculation and internet comments, do at least tell the story of "why". And if you jump the gun on researching the imminently googleable first sentence of your argument, how can I trust, nay, why should I trust, a single sentence thereafter.<p>Long and short APL has patent clauses, BSD doesn't, their PATENTS file kinda added that back to BSD without some of the apparent downsides of the APL in terms of forcing you to never ever sue about patents.<p>Small but not hard, I know, I just have a PhD not some fancy JD, but at least I can do the research that would've muted I imagine the entire post.<p>I still can't seem to write non-confusing sentences though. Oh well. Parse the above at your own peril.
"A. The Additional Grant of Patent Rights in Unnecessary."<p>This is legally incorrect.<p>". 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."<p>Nobody has pushed this view.<p>However, the author seems to miss that such rights are likely <i>not</i> sublicensable, because they are implied, and implied rights are pretty much never sublicensable.<p>That is, i may have gotten the rights. That does not mean i can <i>give someone else the same rights</i>.<p>Now, there are other possible principles, such as exhaustion, that may take care of this (it's a grey area)<p>But it's definitely not the case that implied patent rights are somehow going to be better than an explicit grant.<p>They are for people <i>using</i> software.
They are not for people distributing software.
Email I just sent the OSI:<p>Please see here:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12692552" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12692552</a><p>It turns out companies are now "bastardizing" the license terms. I would love for the OSI to re-evaluate if these licences are truly open source. Open source covers freedom, and I should think that these clauses abridge that freedom since it is very well possible for a company to be required to sue Apple or Facebook over patents. If that unrelated lawsuit "strips" your legal right to use software, that is NOT freedom.<p>Thanks
I think the change in licence has something to do with mobile phone licence issues, React Native had its first official release on a date that correlates to the licence addendum changes, this is the first official tagged release :<p><a href="https://github.com/facebook/react-native/releases/tag/v0.14.2" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/facebook/react-native/releases/tag/v0.14....</a><p>As you can see it is dated: "10 Nov 2015" shortly after the licence was changed.
One interesting thing to note is that the actual license makes no specific references to the patents rider, and in fact the patents grant rider is a separate file completely. Does that mean that I have to follow it, if it's not directly in the license? If we look at the license as a contract, shouldn't it be in the license directly, even if it's referencing something outside?
I'm not sure why they didn't just use the MS-PL it sounds like the same thing? I don't understand why use BSD if the MS-PL achieves what they want, and is backed by Microsoft (surely it would be in their best interest to defend their own license).<p><a href="https://opensource.org/licenses/MS-PL" rel="nofollow">https://opensource.org/licenses/MS-PL</a>
if a person offers two licenses, and you only need to accept one of them to be licensed, then you should be all set.<p>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.<p>Right?
Unrelated to the actual content of the page.. but why does this site require 1.25Mb of javascript to load? It makes up nearly 70% of the entire page, and is responsible for almost 60% of the requests needed to render the page. Do you really need to use that much javascript just to render a blog post. Why?<p>Those webfonts also took multiple seconds to retrieve leaving the page essentially completely blank to visitors until their browsers finally pulled them down. It paused long enough I was wondering if HN had sent sufficient traffic to bring the site down.<p>Here's an output to a quick stab at loading the page using pingdom: <a href="https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/cpZuGy/http://www.elcaminolegal.com/single-post/2016/10/04/Facebook-Reactjs-License" rel="nofollow">https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/cpZuGy/http://www.elcaminolegal...</a>
This has been a major issue for me from the get go, it goes against open source culture but that's no surprise because that is what Facebook loves to do (which it has consistently proved).<p>They pick something upcoming, recreate it injecting their ideals while knocking the original. They then release it to a sea of "pseudo developers" that latch onto it with the "well it's good because Facebook" mentality which aggressively defend it giving them more leverage.<p>Then they rinse and repeat until they have replaced everything the community has created with their equivalent instead of contributing back to those projects like a true supporter of open source would.<p>Open source is much more than having code on a repo, it's a culture that Facebook is hell bent on "changing".
interesting article about why startups should never use Reactjs because if it's license<p><a href="https://medium.com/bits-and-pixels/a-compelling-reason-not-to-use-reactjs-beac24402f7b#.i625jul0b" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/bits-and-pixels/a-compelling-reason-not-t...</a>
So I checked StackExchange's law site and found this question - thus far unanswered, but those would be my questions exactly:<p><a href="http://law.stackexchange.com/questions/14337/q-about-consequences-of-a-software-license-amendment-regarding-patents-facebook" rel="nofollow">http://law.stackexchange.com/questions/14337/q-about-consequ...</a><p>It comes down to two questions (quoted from the linked question) - note that those are <i>questions</i>, not assertions:<p>1)<p><pre><code> > ... if we use any of Facebook's open source projects Facebook can violate *our patents* (of any
> kind) pretty much with impunity: If we try to sue them we lose the right to patents covering their
> open source projects(?)
</code></pre>
2)<p><pre><code> > I have read opinions that other open source projects that don't have such a clause, for example
> those from Microsoft or Google, nevertheless have the exact same problem, only that it isn't
> explicitly stated. Is that true? Is my situation not any better when I only use open source
> projects without such a clause?
</code></pre>
I think that is a good point. The many opinions I see are almost all from people who don't have their own patents to think about, but what happens if you are a company and you do? Would you basically allow Facebook to use any of your patents, because for all practical purposes you can't defend them if you rely on their open source projects?
Frankly multiple developers don't really care about the licenses or clauses. Software veterans and corporations care about it more than anyone else. Even the article is kinda hard to grasp in one go that I had to read a couple of times. To find the nuances in an OSS license and to think and act on it is not easy for a lot non native English speakers. And more posts like these are needed to make many people read and know about these serious issues.
I'm not a lawyer so I can't say with certainty, but I'm sure Facebook could make React's license a bit nicer in some ways.<p>But I can't buy it as a reason for not using React, that sounds bogus to me. Facebook isn't gonna come sue your beer-ranking app company over a patent beef.
Similar approach to the patchwork of various patent grants on Opus implementations; it's still open source, it just might not be free for 100% of the purposes you could think of.<p>I think Robert doesn't understand that <i>open source</i> refers to the <i>source code</i> being <i>open to use, derivation, and study</i>. The BSD license also includes a warranty disclaimer, which is the exact same kind of protective language as the patent grant. The Facebook arrangement meets all of those requirements with the one stipulation that you forfeit the license when you enter patent litigation against Facebook for a counterclaim the granted patents or primary litigation for unrelated patents. I don't consider countersuing Facebook for patents applying to React, while USING REACT, to be a serious fundamental software freedom.
So this attorney's problem is that rather than ambiguously granting a license to the patent claims necessary to implement this software, they decided to explicitly grant such rights? I see no problems.
For some reason, I have NO idea why, just like Angular. Just something kind of cool about it. React I'm sure is awesome, but Angular just seems to have something special. Just that extra "something."
Other Open Source licenses have patent termination provisions. Apache 2.0 (which React used to use) says "If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.". There are other licenses as well that include more extensive patent termination provisions, such as the APSL.
The argument that "This is Not Open Source Software" feels unsupported and very sloppy.<p>> Thus, the licensee pays a price to use the library. It is not a price paid with money. [..] I could be missing something, but I have never seen any other software license use such a condition and also claim to be an open source license.<p>This just isn't thinking creatively. The GPL also requires a "price to be paid, but not with money" -- you give up your right to keep changes you make secret (if you distribute them). Yet no-one seriously argues that the GPL isn't an open source license.<p>If there is something about giving up the right to file patent lawsuits that is totally different to giving up the right to keep your changes secret, the article doesn't say what that difference is. Giving up the right to keep your changes secret is surely <i>more</i> stringent than giving up your right to file patent infringement lawsuits against one company. Why, then, should the latter be a dealbreaker for an open source license?
React.js is basically licensed so that you cannot make anything that can compete with facebook corporation.<p>Example:<p>1. You create something similar to Instagram using React.<p>2. It gets popular<p>3. Facebook sues you and takes all your reacts and reducers