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I think the story is this: 1. Software patents are a huge, huge, existential crisis facing our industry. 2. So huge, in fact, that nobody wants to deal with i
by Lazare 9y ago
I think the story is this:
1. Software patents are a huge, huge, existential crisis facing our industry.
2. So huge, in fact, that nobody wants to deal with it. We can't realistically figure out if the libraries we are using are covered by patents, and given how broken issuance is, they probably are.
3. So the only practical solution is to use MIT licensed libraries, pretend there's no patent issue, and put our heads in the sand.
4. But Facebook's BSD+Patents license made us think about patents. Nobody stopped and said "can we use Angular? Are there patents on core elements of it?". But people did stop and ask that about React, because Facebook was (accidentally) making people think about patents, and the more you think about patents the more you wish you were a plumber and not a dev so all you'd have to deal with is toilets blocked with shit, and not software patents, which are much worse.
5. Now that it's under an MIT license it's just as dangerous to use React (maybe more) but we can pretend it's safe again.
Notice that Wordpress's decision to switch from React (which probably led to this) was quite clear: They were not switching due to patent concerns about React, they were switching because the non-standard license was stirring up FUD and making people ask them uncomfortable questions. (We know this because they explicitly said so, and also because the leading contender for a new library was Preact, which is strictly more dangerous from a patent point of view than React under every possible circumstance, but has a license that lets your pretend everything is okay easier.)
- chrisco255 9y agoThis. I don't even want to know how many patents we're all infringing on in everything we ship. We all just sort of sweep this under the rug. No one ever does a technical/patent analysis. Is patent check part of your deployment pipeline? I highly doubt it. There's probably tens of thousands of broadly worded software patents out in the wild. The only thing that keeps the industry safe is how difficult it actually is to do that analysis because of the inherent complexity in both software and patent law.
- lukaszsamson 9y agoI have one counter example. I used to work at Samsung's R&D a few years ago and there patent analysis (and filing patents) was obligatory for every developer. They had been bitten by lawsuits a few times so they learned.
- cjbprime 9y agoYou're actually discouraged from conducting that patent analysis, since damages are trebled for willful infringement.
- dtzur 9y ago"and the more you think about patents the more you wish you were a plumber and not a dev so all you'd have to deal with is toilets blocked with shit, and not software patents, which are much worse." This.
- matt4077 9y agoThe sad thing is that Facebook's policy was obviously informed by exactly this point of view, that, essentially, software should not be patented. It's the backlash that was led by people who considered it a realistic possibility that they may, some day, want to sue Facebook for infringing on one of their precious patents.