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There is a serious problem with the Facebook license. I've heard this and many other "it'll be ok because..." kind of statements in discussions about Facebook
by Steeeve 9y ago
There is a serious problem with the Facebook license. I've heard this and many other "it'll be ok because..." kind of statements in discussions about Facebook licensing. The problem is that there is no clear agreement as to what the ramifications are, and no real clarity offered by facebook after repeated efforts by the community to obtain it.
The only clarity they offer is that they have their license in place for litigation purposes.
For a personal project, everybody can make their own decisions. For a project involving a corporate entity or an institution, it is irresponsible to leverage any facebook licensed software without a legal review of the license. I'm not saying that it's bad. I'm not saying that it's good. I'm saying that however a laymen may interpret the license, there is a high chance of being wrong. Better to have the professionals review it and make a judgement call. I have seen many people state that their legal departments reviewed the license and have come back in some cases supporting the use of facebook software, in other cases denying the ability to use it. Even among professionals there seems to be disagreement.
There is a common understanding of many open source licenses. There is none surrounding facebook's.
I have asked ASF to have their lawyers make a public interpretation of the facebook BSD+Patents license for the betterment of the community, but the response was along the lines of "no lawyer would do that." Someone else might have better luck with the FSF. The FSF does support the idea of patent clauses, or at least at one point they did. I have seen nothing from them regarding the facebook license specifically though.
- jnbiche 9y ago> For a project involving a corporate entity or an institution, it is irresponsible to leverage any facebook licensed software without a legal review of the license. And this is a problem, because we all know how much of a huge pain in the ass it is to get any new license or legal issue relating to open source cleared with a big corporation's legal dept. I think this is a pretty clear signal from Facebook that at least part of the company really doesn't care if people use Facebook open source or not. After all the work some in the company have done to promote Facebook open source, to great benefit to the company for recruiting and for synergy with other large company open source, that is a big surprise to me. This kind of tone-deaf response from part of the company with the other half frustrated that it's causing so many problems reminds me more of how large old, moribund companies like IBM operate. It's a surprise that Facebook's already there, or at least starting to be.