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If we can just remove emotion for a little bit, and coldly apply law and the terms of the license to fact, the picture is really not so dire. - As stated in th

If we can just remove emotion for a little bit, and coldly apply law and the terms of the license to fact, the picture is really not so dire. - As stated in the standard BSD 3 clause, you're more or less licensed to do whatever you want with the software. - The above doesn't give you a patent grant (at least not an explicit one), so Facebook also grants you a license to use any patents they have associated with the software. - The ONLY possible way you can lose the above patent grant is if YOU sue Facebook for patent infringement. Even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that everyone working at Facebook is a child of Satan, the only thing your company has to do to not lose the patent grant is NOT SUE Facebook for patent infringement. Seems pretty simple, no? If your company is one that plans to, as part of its business plan, make money by suing companies like Facebook for patent infringement (which I have nothing against by the way), probably don't use react . Everyone else, what is there to lose? Is the BSD-3 + PATENTS as nice as the Apache 2? No. Is it anything to get hysterical over? I can't see why.

yladiz 9y ago
It's because it covers any unrelated patents, not just the ones related to React. You can't sue Facebook or its subsidiaries, like Oculus or Instagram, for patent infringement, e.g. if Oculus were to infringe on your VR or AR patent, without losing a grant to any patents that may cover React owned by Facebook. It's unknown that Facebook has any patents for React, but if it did, it could countersue you simply because you rightly assert your patent against their infringing technology. If you own a company or are part of a university that has a patent and Facebook infringes, then you can't really use any of their open source products that have this specific grant, rather than not being able to use the specific product that they are infringing upon, if any. It's their prerogative to disallow that, but it goes against the spirit of open source, in my opinion. I speculate that this grant was probably written in this way to ward off NPEs, but I doubt any of those NPEs actually would use React and so in reality it causes issues for pretty much anyone else that cares.

yladiz 9y ago

It's because it covers any unrelated patents, not just the ones related to React. You can't sue Facebook or its subsidiaries, like Oculus or Instagram, for patent infringement, e.g. if Oculus were to infringe on your VR or AR patent, without losing a grant to any patents that may cover React owned by Facebook. It's unknown that Facebook has any patents for React, but if it did, it could countersue you simply because you rightly assert your patent against their infringing technology. If you own a company or are part of a university that has a patent and Facebook infringes, then you can't really use any of their open source products that have this specific grant, rather than not being able to use the specific product that they are infringing upon, if any. It's their prerogative to disallow that, but it goes against the spirit of open source, in my opinion. I speculate that this grant was probably written in this way to ward off NPEs, but I doubt any of those NPEs actually would use React and so in reality it causes issues for pretty much anyone else that cares.