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Comment by jonny_eh | Hacker News Reader

Was it asymmetrical? I thought it was a "we won't sue you for anything in this software, unless you sue us first". This change still allows them to sue you for any reason.

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to be fair, Facebook could still sue anyone for any reason they can think of irregardless of what you're using! ;-)

They could, but you would still get to keep the PATENTS clause. It was asymmetrical, but in the direction against Facebook.

It’s asymmetrical in the sense that your license terminates even if you sue them for something that’s not in the software you’re using. I.e. they rip off your feature, and you’re using React, you’re f##d.

Literally not true. You’d just revert to BSD if you sued.

So same protection as now.

Literally is true. In the presence of patents BSD license alone (and MIT, too) would basically mean you’re infringing on their IP, and they can and will bring action against you on the basis of your use of their software, even if your legal action against them was over completely unrelated patents.

Not sure what you're trying to say as your phrasing is jumbled but the BSD licence offers zero protection from their patents now. They can sue you whenever they like now.

This is, of course, true of any other OSS and patent holding company.

Many argue that the difference is between the old explicit grant (which was one-sided) and the new implicit grant (which is more two-sided). Reverting to BSD doesn't remove the fact that the explicit grant was revoked, so the real comparison of one sued is BSD with no inplicit grant to MIT with an implicit grant.

Implicit grants have very little case law and what law there is doesn't look too useful for people in this case (the patent(s) would have to be extremely specifically applicable to the code, which most patents are designed not to be).

So I trust implicit grants much less than explicit.

Right, if they were equal grants, I would too. But they aren't, that's the point.

It's a principled stand for sure, and I can respect that, but it also means that in practice you get less protection.

Like, I'd love to live in a world where patent protection wasn't even an issue but we don't. So in this situation we end up with less protection due to compatibility concerns.

Given we do live in a world where software patents are valuable to companies and they won't all want to give blanket irrevocable licenses... there has to be a way for business to do that and protect users of the software.

The patent grant FB did was a (flawed) attempt at that.

Not sure how the topic veered; this thread was about the difference between BSD+Patents - Patents vs MIT and the two being less equal (in my opinion) than first posited, because the +Patents and -Patents don't cancel out to equal the implicit patent grant of MIT.

Even if you believe the implicit grant to be weak, or Facebook's Patent grant to be better than an implicit grant, the above discussion stands independently of those things.

If you sued Facebook, you would have lost the patent grant, but not the copyright. With the new license, there's no patent grant at all, so if any code in React is patented, you're in the same boat as you'd have been if you'd sued in the prior situation.

Edit: It seems like some consider MIT, unlike BSD, to have an implied patent grant based on its wording: https://www.scribd.com/document/46088081/Closing-the-Loophol...

Keep in mind that holding a patent allows the patentholder to prohibit someone else from importing, making, selling, or using some product or practice.

The MIT license gives you the rights to "use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software", and that's not even exhaustive. (See "without restriction" and "without limitation".)

Is there something missing from the second list that you think needs protection from the powers granted to patentholders (the things in the first list)?

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