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> 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 r
by ronjouch 10y ago
> 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.
Could you (or anyone confident in their legalese) elaborate on:
* Does the Apache2 license indeed solve this? (I'm asking because I read about it in the LLVM/Clang license change proposal [1])
* Why isn't the less-popular-but-still-well-established Apache2 license more widely used, then? To counter what you are saying about simplicity, don't you think patents are a common concern that should be covered by default in a license, even at some complexity cost?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12531887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12531887
EDIT: precisions, wording.
- tracker1 10y agoApache 2, iirc, has similar patent provisions where you lose patent protection if you bring suit to any contributors.
- philipodonnell 10y agoImportant caveat as I understand it from other comments: Apache 2 is limited only to suits about derivative works under that specific license. Facebook's is much broader because you lose patent protection if you bring suit against Facebook about anything, even patents with nothing to do with React, like hardware, and even if Facebook is intentionally violating one of your patents.
- DannyBee 10y agoThis is correct. In apache2 you only lose the right to that work, and only the patent rights, not copyright rights. So in a work with no patents, i can sue you as much as i want without fear :P