React, Facebook, and the Revokable Patent License. Why It’s a Paper Tiger.
medium.comIf it's a paper tiger then why are legal teams blocking teams from adopting it?
There's the theoretical risk of patent infringement that this post addresses, but the more important point (imo) is that the current state of affairs is stopping React adoption for teams that, without the input from their careful lawyers, would gladly adopt it. Or the fact the ASF legal team banned this type of license as a dependency for any of their projects.
Could facebook change the license at any time for future versions? I guess at least they couldn't do that retroactively for previous versions since those are already "released".
Of course. As with any project, with the agreement of all copyright holders, you can relicense at any time. Facebook has already changed the license twice.
You could, if you wanted, fork the original Apache v2 licensed version that didn't contain the PATENTS file. (Although as per the linked article, why would you want to?)
I guess that's a double edged sword, right now it is harmless but who knows where FB can take it
A suppose, but the point of the analysis is that one edge of the sword is pretty dull.
The point being that even in the extremely, vastly unlikely case that things would progress to an actual patent infringement suit that you lose, in the end, it may not matter, based on:
And even if Facebook could assert a valid patent protecting React, the damages are very speculative. I cannot find a case awarding a judgement for infringing a patent otherwise licensed through open source, but it’s not a case I’d want to file. “Hey Juror #2, please award my client Facebook money because we pulled a patent license that’s otherwise granted to millions of other people free of charge.”
It's hard to see a path for it to get more dangerous with time.