Also by "license" I meant the "BSD + Patents license" as the Facebook writeup put it.
Those others were wrong. Facebook have made this very clear in their FAQ [1]:
> Does termination of the additional patent grant in the Facebook BSD+Patents license cause the copyright license to also terminate?
> No.
If BSD is a "license to use", then it is implicitly a copyright license _and_ a patent licence.
Assuming the above, the argument goes that the implicit patent license in plain BSD is overridden by the explicit patent license in BSD+Patents, and that the explicit one is much more restrictive than the (unwritten) implicit one.
The FAQ doesn't address that.
I meant to write "better than using." Also, I was not aware of the implied patent license argument.
It's not a copyright license. It's a patent grant/license which is completely independent. This matters for several reasons, including when just saying "license", this usually means a copyright license.
If this patent grant get's revoked, you are back to simply using the BSD license with no patent grant. I've read so many people say "you'd have to stop using react if you sued facebook", uh, no, you'd have a bsd license with no patent grant like you probably do with tons of other free software your company uses. Clearly, people should be complaining about that if they are complaining about this, but the misunderstanding and misinformation is really strong. If you believe software patents are universally bad, like many people including me, then it is clearly better using the MIT/BSD license alone, which gives you zero patent rights, you are simply infringing and waiting to be sued. I have no problem with it. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/software-patents.en.html.