This discussion just goes to show again the extent to which the tech community allowed itself to be gaslighted into accepting that:
1. Anything about react is patentable.
2. Licensing of unspecified patents is a thing.
3. Licensing of software without disclosing related patents held by the author does not invalidate those patents on the basis of bad faith acting alone.
In what obscene legal reality does adding a patent grant that can be revoked in certain circumstances puts the licensee in a worse position than a license that does not mention patents at all ?
if you called it a patent 'clause' - rather than a grant - then does it make more sense? More clauses == more legal conditions.
The fact is that patents are obsurd in software. It should be treated like in the fashion industry - notice how clothing design is _not_ patentable, and the fashion industry has not an iota of being un-innovative or impeded! In fact, the very reason of being able to make any design copy in fashion leads to the large proliferation of innovations, as each designer tries to one-up another.
Yes to my non-lawyerish understanding making it a clause in the BSD license would be different - it would no longer be a BSD license but rather a new (non OSI) license containing provisions regarding patents.
I agree that software patents are evil but then so are many other parts of the modern legal system, but even with them it feels that what facebook (and other companies) are doing shouldn't have any legal standing - see my comment down the original thread.
and i'd argue that the license that facebook is using _is_ indeed a new license! It's BSD plus something added to it!
Unless the end user has the choice to not take the patent clause ("grant") as part of their license. IANAL, so i dont know if it is possible to cherry pick like this.
It wouldn't be a "grant" if the user didn't have a choice of not taking it.
Consider if somewhere in the repo there was a file called GOATS which conditioned the right to use react on having goats sacrificed to facebook every new moon, would it make react BSD+Goats licensed ?
1. Anything about react is patentable.
2. Licensing of unspecified patents is a thing.
3. Licensing of software without disclosing related patents held by the author does not invalidate those patents on the basis of bad faith acting alone.
In what obscene legal reality does adding a patent grant that can be revoked in certain circumstances puts the licensee in a worse position than a license that does not mention patents at all ?