That is, on its face, absolutely untrue. Nowhere in the React patent terms does it specify that you grant Facebook rights to use your patents--not even to ones related to React.

That's something that isn't in the React terms, nor does it seem to show up in any legal analyses published online from a lawyer making that claim. (None of the analyses I've seen, at least; if you found some, please post them.) In fact, the only place where this claim does crop up is in off-the-cuff message board comments.

FWIW, I don't use React, I don't want to, I'm not a Facebook employee, and in fact I think the world would be a lot better off with Facebook having less influence than they do today. But that doesn't change how weird it is to keep seeing comments like yours that make claims like the one above.

Then you have no patent protection in the first place! You are in the same situation as when the patent grant expired because you sued them. I don't see how this is any better.

You do not give them a license to use any patent. You are right that in practice the non-enforcement means that they can willy-nilly use your patents. But if we are arguing about factual ability vs legal rights - they can probably already to that, due to the fact that they likely have more money and better lawyers then you do.

And if you do have the license - then what? It's still a react death-knell should any submarine patent appear; no large company is every going to agree to such an assymetrical deal.

Better to at least be left in the situation where it's likely in facebook's own interest to never surface any (so restrictively licensed) patents in the first place.

The thing is, if you just use react for something inconsequential, and can live with the fact that you have to cease using it when you sue Facebook, then it is fine.

You shouldn't base your business on Facebook's (potential) patents, and then attack them with your own patents - but that is true with or without the patent grant.

Of course, what would be great would be 1) a finer grained, symmetrical patent grant, or 2) a bilateral agreement between your company and Facebook instead of the patent grant. If you are big enough and have patents, you can probably negotiate something like that.

The chilling future effect, which I believe is the primary driver of op worries, is what if you build on React and are the next Facebook? (I.e. you are growing quickly to become "big enough" but are not yet)

Old Facebook now how a lot more leverage on you at several critical moments -- either in terms of making an offer, or in the negotiations around a more reciprocal patent licensing deal, or the aforementioned infringing of your patents, or the mere threat of either if someone else makes an offer.

The entire point of ladder kicking is to build a moat to ensure that others can't grow past you in the same way you did, and this is pretty effective at that (intentionally or unintentionally).

As you said, a more reciprocal, more finely-scoped patent balance would resolve these concerns. (E.g. "if you sue Facebook over a patent involved in React...")

If Facebook wanted to be the good guys here they would license under Apache 2.0 or write their own symmetric patent grant. They already relicensed RocksDB after Apache's move, perhaps they will do the rest of their stuff too.

Not really. If you have BSD with no patent grants you can at least argue that there's an implicit patent grant. If there's an explicit patent grant which you violated/got terminated that defence is clearly not going to fly.

I was involved with an opensource project which got a patent application submitted by the company. Even though I pointed out prior art. And even though I refused to sign the application as one of the authors. That's corporate environment for you.

If Zuckerberg signs a paper with the wrong title, there's a troll lawsuit the next day. So if you make a habit of "in practice" strongarming people, you can easily slip up and have a huge headache on your hands.

You maybe be right, but why would I want to take my chances?

I detailed the specifics.

Take this example:

In exchange for doing graphic design on your menu, I stipulate that I can shut down your bakery if you take me to court when I eat from the bakery without paying. Now, sure, I haven't granted you the right to come eat my wares, but I'm going to have to shutdown my shop to keep it from happening.

In this case as long as you change the menu you can go back and enforce it, but with software, it isn't as feasible (say you had a game built on top of Raknet, which has the same PATENTS rider).

EDIT: better?

Ceding your license to use any patents Facebook may or may not have on React. There's a difference.

You may still have other kinds of patents, which are very much enforceable.

https://www.epo.org/law-practice/legal-texts/html/guidelines...

I'll send you US$50 if you can find ANY evidence this is true in the US, UK, Aus, or Canada. :)

https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=US90... https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=US19...

Query:

    PA:facebook* AND FP:(Hierarchical user interface) AND CTR:US

Now where does it say that? The way I read it, so long as you don't sue Facebook, you have a patent grant. If you believe people when they say that their patent portfolios are purely defensive, there is no problem.

On the other hand, being the aggressor in a patent lawsuit loses you the patent grant. This seems sane enough to me.

The normal state of affairs is completely ambiguous about patents. You get no explicit grant, so if they feel like suing, there's nothing to stop them. Some people claim an implicit grant, but there's no conclusive ruling on it.

I don't particularly care for software patents, but I don't see anything more stupid than the usual lawyerly CYA layered on an attempt to disambiguate the patent situation.

The clause also doesn't explicitly cover software patents only, so if Facebook infringes on your hardware patents (which is plausible, since Facebook does hardware related work as well), you still can't sue them.

It might as well say "we agree to not destroy your business using dirty tricks if you don't attempt the same".

Of course, opinions on that are divided...

This is an oversimplification. There are plenty of mum and dad inventors who would get destroyed by large companies but for relying on patent protection for their life's work.

Why should Facebook support companies that are suing them?

If they were offering something unique or especially distinctive, then maybe it would be worth risking, but as there are half a dozen or so alternatives, why bother putting myself into that particular pickle?

This doesn't prevent you from suing. It just prevents you from suing over patents.

I can understand why Facebook would want to have a clause like this (to discourage lawsuits against them), but I would consider it against the spirit of open source to do so (ie. Facebook should be able to continue to do this, but I wouldn't consider React to be open source software in that case).

I guess the GPLv3 has provisions for patents, but older licenses didn't. I remember some controversy around open source video codecs that you were not able to use safely because they were infringing patents.

GPLv2 didn't have a patent grant because it wasn't a very well-known issue in 1991. Apache 2.0 was the first free software license to have a patent grant (which unfortunately made it GPLv2 incompatible) but GPLv3 included a similar (though stronger) patent grant because of Apache 2.0.

While these may sound like theoretical problems, people have been sued over using GIF, MP3, etc before. Every time you install Firefox, it will download a free software binary from a Cisco server that does h264 decoding[5]. However, they cannot legally recompile the binaries themselves as it means that the patent grant no longer applies and Mozilla (or your distribution) could be sued -- even though the binary's source is BSD-licensed.

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fighting-software-patents.htm... [2]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/danger-of-software-patents.ht... [3]: https://www.fsf.org/licensing/h264-patent-license [4]: https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/prod/audiocodec/audi... [5]: http://www.openh264.org/index.html

Where does it say what? Which part of my post are you taking issue with, because I would love to correct anything.

What it certainly doesn't say is that Facebook's patent portfolio is non-aggressive. And when, outside of this, has Facebook said that about their entire portfolio (I'm not saying they haven't, I just haven't seen that before)?

My professional opinion is that if you use React and are concerned about this, talk to your attorney.

Has any of this React patent usage agreement been tested yet?

The answer to that one is, unfortunately, yes.

Maybe someone out there has access to legal cases and could help?

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https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/master/PATENTS

edit: nvm, I misread line 16-17. Naturally line 21-26 is mostly useless.

> The license granted hereunder will terminate, automatically and without notice, if you (or any of your subsidiaries, corporate affiliates or agents) initiate directly or indirectly, or take a direct financial interest in, any Patent Assertion: (i) against Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or corporate affiliates

If you have to agree not to enforce any of your patents, that's pretty much equivalent to giving Facebook the rights to use them.

Obviously, if that were to happen, you’d simply have to stop using React or else you’d get countersued for using React without a license right?

Why would anyone use React ever if that’s how it works? It feels like a payday loan – React makes it “easy” right now, but if your business is built dependent on React, you could pay a serious price later in exchange for “right now” convenience. It makes a strong case for Ember or Glimmer or any of the other front-end systems not tied to Facebook. Imagine a React “Native” app around which your business is based – you’d have to rewrite the entire thing of Facebook were to start using some patented aspect of your business.

Perhaps I am misinformed, but it seems absolutely bonkers to essentially indemnify Facebook from patent infringement just by virtue of using React somewhere in your business.

Imagine if Apple did this: if you release on the App Store using Xcode, you can’t sue us for any patent infringement ever or we’ll sue you for using Xcode illegally.

Is my assessment correct? Is React that good to risk such a situation? Facebook could sit back and watch a company using React develop something amazing, then Facebook could steal it and you’d have no recourse but to stop using React. Meanwhile, while you are rebuilding your application, you lose all your customers, but if you don’t rebuild your application, Facebook can legally take your invention and crush you in the market. Either way, you lose – simply because a few developers on the team were insistent on React’s greatness. If I were a VC, I’d be incredibly wary about supporting a company using React for their primary application.

Am I wrong? I am not trying to be argumentative – I just want to be sure I am understanding this correctly.

It's funny you mention Apple, because the Apple Public Source License has a very similar provision.

> 12.1 Termination. This License and the rights granted hereunder will terminate: > ... >(c) automatically without notice from Apple if You, at any time during the term of this License, commence an action for patent infringement against Apple; provided that Apple did not first commence an action for patent infringement against You in that instance.

The good news is that the Apple Public Source License is basically dead and not used for anything of importance.

Please explain to me - are they able to change it again at any time in the future to "unclear" it again or just change wording altogether? Will it affect all users retroactively in that case? Because all this "they had bad wording in license but they changed it so we can use it now" sounds kinda crazy.

The University of California did something like this in 1999 when they cancelled the advertising clause of the original BSD license. See ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/4bsd/README.Impt.License.Change.

I see nothing that limits the termination clause to patents involving React. The only limitation following those general lines is the one you quoted, which is a limitation on the exception, implying that the license does terminate if the patent over which Facebook sued you is a React patent.