5 ms·

What happens when those patents are no longer potential and have been granted to Facebook?

Lazare 9y ago
A patent application must be filed within 1 year of public disclosure or its barred, and React has been out for years. And any pending application filed during that 1 year window would be visible now, so... ...nothing is going to happen. There's no submarine patents possible here. (...from Facebook, anyhow.)
- chaostheory 9y ago
  This license isn't exclusive to React. Assuming that you're correct and Facebook's legal team made a mistake, what happens when everything is filed correctly with another project? What happens when another company uses this? I can't help but feel that the big picture is being missed. If Facebook's open source projects don't lose momentum, other companies will be tempted to do follow
- e9 9y ago
  FYI this patent was published recently: "Automatic overdraw reduction before rendering" https://www.google.com/patents/US20170221242?dq=facebook+user+interface+react+virtual+dom&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjWo8DVvZzWAhWojlQKHXRDAkgQ6AEIPzAD https://www.google.com/patents/US20170221242?dq=facebook+use...
  - Lazare 9y ago
    Fascinating. Well, good to know, and that does change thing a bit. So, better make sure nothing you use has any form of smart overdraw reduction, dom diffing, etc., before you pick a patent fight with Facebook. Of course, a cursory glance suggests every modern frontend UI library will violate that patent, so I still don't see a reason to avoid React; Vue, Angular, and recent versions of Ember are all just as much in violation. Guess we're back to static HTML and PHP. :) (More seriously, hopefully it won't go anywhere; it's pretty clearly got a ton of prior art. But given how broken the patent system is, who knows?)
    - mickronome 9y ago
      Yeah, the claims appears to be the usual ”-We do the desktop thing, but it's actually completely a different thing because we implement it in a browser, and it's natural confines". However, imho one of the major problems with software related patents is allowing an extremely ambiguous language in a field where exact language is the native form of expression. It simultaneously makes it excessively expensive to challenge a patent, and almost impossible to divine if a particular implementation is covered. There is code I've written that a client wanted to patent, and knowing the nature of the code, it's not a snowball's chance in hell I would recognise that (my own) algorithm if it was written in patentese, at least without spending days on it. I don't even want to think about how many hours of legal fees it would cost to challenge even such a minor algorithm.

A patent application must be filed within 1 year of public disclosure or its barred, and React has been out for years. And any pending application filed during that 1 year window would be visible now, so... ...nothing is going to happen. There's no submarine patents possible here. (...from Facebook, anyhow.)

chaostheory 9y ago
This license isn't exclusive to React. Assuming that you're correct and Facebook's legal team made a mistake, what happens when everything is filed correctly with another project? What happens when another company uses this? I can't help but feel that the big picture is being missed. If Facebook's open source projects don't lose momentum, other companies will be tempted to do follow
e9 9y ago
FYI this patent was published recently: "Automatic overdraw reduction before rendering" https://www.google.com/patents/US20170221242?dq=facebook+user+interface+react+virtual+dom&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjWo8DVvZzWAhWojlQKHXRDAkgQ6AEIPzAD https://www.google.com/patents/US20170221242?dq=facebook+use...
- Lazare 9y ago
  Fascinating. Well, good to know, and that does change thing a bit. So, better make sure nothing you use has any form of smart overdraw reduction, dom diffing, etc., before you pick a patent fight with Facebook. Of course, a cursory glance suggests every modern frontend UI library will violate that patent, so I still don't see a reason to avoid React; Vue, Angular, and recent versions of Ember are all just as much in violation. Guess we're back to static HTML and PHP. :) (More seriously, hopefully it won't go anywhere; it's pretty clearly got a ton of prior art. But given how broken the patent system is, who knows?)
  - mickronome 9y ago
    Yeah, the claims appears to be the usual ”-We do the desktop thing, but it's actually completely a different thing because we implement it in a browser, and it's natural confines". However, imho one of the major problems with software related patents is allowing an extremely ambiguous language in a field where exact language is the native form of expression. It simultaneously makes it excessively expensive to challenge a patent, and almost impossible to divine if a particular implementation is covered. There is code I've written that a client wanted to patent, and knowing the nature of the code, it's not a snowball's chance in hell I would recognise that (my own) algorithm if it was written in patentese, at least without spending days on it. I don't even want to think about how many hours of legal fees it would cost to challenge even such a minor algorithm.