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Re:A startup founder and ex-Facebook engineer’s story of the... by chaostheory on Sunday September 10, 2017 @11:30PM (#15215702)
What happens when those patents are no longer potential and have been granted to Facebook?
Re:A startup founder and ex-Facebook engineer’s story of the... by Lazare on Monday September 11, 2017 @01:44AM (#15216229)
A patent application must be filed within 1 year of public disclosure or its barred, and React has been out for years. And any pending application filed during that 1 year window would be visible now, so...

...nothing is going to happen. There's no submarine patents possible here. (...from Facebook, anyhow.)

Re:A startup founder and ex-Facebook engineer’s story of the... by e9 on Monday September 11, 2017 @02:27AM (#15216421)
FYI this patent was published recently: "Automatic overdraw reduction before rendering" https://www.google.com/patents/US20170221242?dq=facebook+use...
Re:A startup founder and ex-Facebook engineer’s story of the... by Lazare on Monday September 11, 2017 @05:21AM (#15217152)
Fascinating. Well, good to know, and that does change thing a bit.

So, better make sure nothing you use has any form of smart overdraw reduction, dom diffing, etc., before you pick a patent fight with Facebook.

Of course, a cursory glance suggests every modern frontend UI library will violate that patent, so I still don't see a reason to avoid React; Vue, Angular, and recent versions of Ember are all just as much in violation. Guess we're back to static HTML and PHP. :)

(More seriously, hopefully it won't go anywhere; it's pretty clearly got a ton of prior art. But given how broken the patent system is, who knows?)

Re:A startup founder and ex-Facebook engineer’s story of the... by mickronome on Monday September 11, 2017 @07:51AM (#15217770)
Yeah, the claims appears to be the usual ”-We do the desktop thing, but it's actually completely a different thing because we implement it in a browser, and it's natural confines".

However, imho one of the major problems with software related patents is allowing an extremely ambiguous language in a field where exact language is the native form of expression.

It simultaneously makes it excessively expensive to challenge a patent, and almost impossible to divine if a particular implementation is covered.

There is code I've written that a client wanted to patent, and knowing the nature of the code, it's not a snowball's chance in hell I would recognise that (my own) algorithm if it was written in patentese, at least without spending days on it.

I don't even want to think about how many hours of legal fees it would cost to challenge even such a minor algorithm.

Re:A startup founder and ex-Facebook engineer’s story of the... by chaostheory on Monday September 11, 2017 @02:18AM (#15216382)
This license isn't exclusive to React. Assuming that you're correct and Facebook's legal team made a mistake, what happens when everything is filed correctly with another project? What happens when another company uses this? I can't help but feel that the big picture is being missed. If Facebook's open source projects don't lose momentum, other companies will be tempted to do follow