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I think it's more about the complexity of licensing, patents, and the uncertainty a new license presents. Using a license that's been in use for a long time, a

I think it's more about the complexity of licensing, patents, and the uncertainty a new license presents. Using a license that's been in use for a long time, and has the endorsement of major OSS organizations, is pretty much always more comfortable for developers. I wasn't uncomfortable enough with their licenses to rule out their projects based on the license, but I understand the folks who were. Even if my reading of the license makes me unafraid of it, there was enough uncertainty about how a court, particularly courts that have a history of siding with patent trolls, might interpret the license, for it to make some people nervous. Also, the belief that the copyrights and patents involved will always belong to a benevolent actor ignores a lot of tech history. See: SCO, Oracle, etc. for examples of a previously decent stakeholder being consumed by a more malevolent and litigious one with a different interpretation of the law and the license. facebook may be a huge, unassailable, force today...can we be certain that in ten years that'll still be true? I'd bet on it, but I also won't be shocked if something dramatic happens. Sun looked pretty unassailable through the 80s and 90s, and then they didn't. Big companies building big projects have to think about these things if they want to be responsible about the future of their projects. (Again, I agree that in this case, the fear is probably overblown. But, I get where it's coming from.)

kelnos 9y ago
By that logic we'd never have any new licenses, because everyone would be afraid to use them. We take it on faith now that whenever a new release of the GPL comes out, we won't be afraid of it just because it's new. People had problems with GPLv3 when it came out, but those problems were about specific parts of the license, not "oh god it's new and scary and we don't know how to interpret it". And that's the GPL, a license orders of magnitude more complex than BSD+Patents. As an aside, I realized I read FB's license wrong -- it actually is even better for users of it, and specifically says that the patent termination clause only goes into effect if the user is the aggressor. If FB comes after you for a patent claim, you can counter-sue all you want without losing your license. So FB is actually doing the absolutely correct thing here.

kelnos 9y ago

By that logic we'd never have any new licenses, because everyone would be afraid to use them. We take it on faith now that whenever a new release of the GPL comes out, we won't be afraid of it just because it's new. People had problems with GPLv3 when it came out, but those problems were about specific parts of the license, not "oh god it's new and scary and we don't know how to interpret it". And that's the GPL, a license orders of magnitude more complex than BSD+Patents. As an aside, I realized I read FB's license wrong -- it actually is even better for users of it, and specifically says that the patent termination clause only goes into effect if the user is the aggressor. If FB comes after you for a patent claim, you can counter-sue all you want without losing your license. So FB is actually doing the absolutely correct thing here.