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A comment on A startup founder and ex-Facebook engineer’s story of the BSD + Patents license. Parent comment

Re:A startup founder and ex-Facebook engineer’s story of the... by notacoward on Sunday September 10, 2017 @11:51PM (#15215767)
> if you want to sue FB for patent infringement, you would be very unwise to continue using React.

If you want to sue any company for patent infringement, you would be very unwise to continue using their software under most common licenses. The most-touted alternatives to React are plain MIT license with no patent grant at all, creating exactly the same risk. Why does the license that prevents you from being sued first get all the condemnation?

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Re:A startup founder and ex-Facebook engineer’s story of the... by btown on Monday September 11, 2017 @12:25AM (#15215898)
IANAL, but this commenter, whose profile claims he is a lawyer, says BSD carries an implicit grant which is broader in theory than Facebook's explicit one, but still has some untested characteristics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9113515
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Re:A startup founder and ex-Facebook engineer’s story of the... by notacoward on Monday September 11, 2017 @07:24AM (#15217645)
It's not just some characteristics that are unsettled. The same people braying about the legal risks of relying on an explicit but revocable patent license should be even more wary of anything implicit or assumed. Any lawyer pretending otherwise in a professional context would be flirting with malpractice.
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Re:A startup founder and ex-Facebook engineer’s story of the... by solomatov on Monday September 11, 2017 @12:05AM (#15215818)
> The most-touted alternatives to React are plain MIT license with no patent grant at all

IANAL, but as far as I understand, MIT license contains implicit patent grant.

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Re:A startup founder and ex-Facebook engineer’s story of the... by singron on Monday September 11, 2017 @12:47AM (#15215994)
If these projects are covered by Facebook patents, it doesn't matter if their license has a patent grant since they don't own rights to the Facebook patents.
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Re:A startup founder and ex-Facebook engineer’s story of the... by kjsthree on Monday September 11, 2017 @01:03AM (#15216051)
Exactly! I have yet to see a solid walkthrough of how my situation is made worse because of an explicit patent grant.

I believe the fear of a grant revocation also revoking the BSD copyright license has been thoroughly settled. If that were the case that would be an issue but FB themselves have put in writing that that is not the case.

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Re:A startup founder and ex-Facebook engineer’s story of the... by monocasa on Monday September 11, 2017 @11:22AM (#15219160)
That's never been tested in court, and requires some rather large leaps of thought.
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Re:A startup founder and ex-Facebook engineer’s story of the... by solomatov on Monday September 11, 2017 @11:47AM (#15219375)
IANAL. There's case law in copyright law concerning implicit grants. We can assume that it's at least partially applicable to patents (See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_license).
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