Sadly, this has facebook's new, horrible patent clause.<p>For those who aren't aware, it says<p>1. If facebook sues you, and you counterclaim over patents (whether about software or not), you will lose rights under all these patent grants.<p>So essentially you can't defend yourself.<p>This is different than the typical apache style patent grant, which instead would say "if you sue me over patents in apache licensed software x, you lose rights to software x" (IE it's limited to software, and limited to the thing you sued over)<p>2. It terminates if you challenge the validity of any facebook patent in any way.
So no shitty software patent busting!
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.<p>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.<p>Likewise, they open-sourced Corona a few years ago, their Hadoop fork, and I'm pretty sure that branch has been abandoned too.<p>So I'm really hesitant to start using any projects out of Facebook unless they develop some processes to actually maintain these projects.
Too bad it is Torch. Working in the lua environment is not enjoyable at all. Every error becomes a long procedure of looking deep into the source of the framework since there is no type information or stack traces to go off whatsoever. You are constantly guessing about the shape of the data or what parameters are supposed to look like.
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.