6 ms·

IANAL, but MIT plus a "patent promise" seems dangerous, because AFAIK it hasn't been established whether such a promise would lead to offensive patent litigatio

IANAL, but MIT plus a "patent promise" seems dangerous, because AFAIK it hasn't been established whether such a promise would lead to offensive patent litigation being thrown out. A lot of people refused to use React because it wasn't clear if Facebook intended to weaponize its patents. After lots of protest, Facebook relented and switched from BSD plus a patent grant to vanilla MIT. It hasn't been established in court if MIT by itself gives you implicit protection against patent litigation, but adding a patent grant that is one-side is, in the opinion of at least a few people on HN, more dangerous than not mentioning patents at all.

yyyk 6y ago
I wasn't following React during that kerfuffle. Reading about it, it seems to be that Facebook made an Apache style licence with a very titled patent clause, where one's rights are terminated following any patent suit against Facebook, even if the patent suit did not relate to React. That is, the problem seems to be the phrasing of the patent clause which was included in the licence, and a different patent promise would not be a problem. The phrasing of the .NET patent promise[0] doesn't seem to have that problem. It might be a bit difficult for people who want to copy and modify the code, since the promise is limited there (only reimplemtations, but I can understand that since they don't want to waive the patents altogether). However, the promise seems fine for users of the framework (IANAL etc. etc.). [0] https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/PATENTS.TXT https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/PATENTS.TXT
- ralmidani 6y ago
  IANAL What if MS retracted its promise? Would the retraction be retroactive? A license is usually perpetual and non-revocable, with causes for revocation being written into the license itself (side note: RMS is not infallible, and my zeal for making everything Copyleft has mellowed, but I still find the wording of the GPL to be pure genius). Has a "patent promise" been tested in court? The GPL has been tested and upheld in some jurisdictions, perhaps most notably in the BusyBox cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#GPL_lawsuits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#GPL_lawsuits
  - yyyk 6y ago
    According to the "In re Spansion" case[0], a patent promise is equivalent to a licence. Given that and the MIT licence, I don't see much of any way for MS to abuse patents against .NET users (IANAL). Amusingly, Apple itself was the beneficiary of the ruling. Speaking of Apple, given its history it's not impossible to imagine a closed source "Swift 6" with no backward compatibility, leaving only a very tiny ecosystem for the open source Swift. [0] https://patentlyo.com/patent/2013/01/3rd-circuit-covenant-not-to-sue-is-a-license-and-therefore-not-dischargeable-in-bankruptcy.html https://patentlyo.com/patent/2013/01/3rd-circuit-covenant-no...

yyyk 6y ago

I wasn't following React during that kerfuffle. Reading about it, it seems to be that Facebook made an Apache style licence with a very titled patent clause, where one's rights are terminated following any patent suit against Facebook, even if the patent suit did not relate to React. That is, the problem seems to be the phrasing of the patent clause which was included in the licence, and a different patent promise would not be a problem. The phrasing of the .NET patent promise[0] doesn't seem to have that problem. It might be a bit difficult for people who want to copy and modify the code, since the promise is limited there (only reimplemtations, but I can understand that since they don't want to waive the patents altogether). However, the promise seems fine for users of the framework (IANAL etc. etc.). [0] https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/PATENTS.TXT https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/PATENTS.TXT

ralmidani 6y ago
IANAL What if MS retracted its promise? Would the retraction be retroactive? A license is usually perpetual and non-revocable, with causes for revocation being written into the license itself (side note: RMS is not infallible, and my zeal for making everything Copyleft has mellowed, but I still find the wording of the GPL to be pure genius). Has a "patent promise" been tested in court? The GPL has been tested and upheld in some jurisdictions, perhaps most notably in the BusyBox cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#GPL_lawsuits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#GPL_lawsuits
- yyyk 6y ago
  According to the "In re Spansion" case[0], a patent promise is equivalent to a licence. Given that and the MIT licence, I don't see much of any way for MS to abuse patents against .NET users (IANAL). Amusingly, Apple itself was the beneficiary of the ruling. Speaking of Apple, given its history it's not impossible to imagine a closed source "Swift 6" with no backward compatibility, leaving only a very tiny ecosystem for the open source Swift. [0] https://patentlyo.com/patent/2013/01/3rd-circuit-covenant-not-to-sue-is-a-license-and-therefore-not-dischargeable-in-bankruptcy.html https://patentlyo.com/patent/2013/01/3rd-circuit-covenant-no...