[hardwaresofton]

So this opinion almost swayed me, but the problem is that companies aren't scared of open source writers suing them.

If you use project A that was written by one or two developers in their spare time (and they included a BSD+patents) clause, would Facebook fear being sued by them? Probably not -- but new companies that get anywhere close to what Facebook does (increasingly, that's everything these days) definitely live with the real possibility of facebook suing them.

In theory the "no one is able to bring patent suits against anyone because they're violating licenses" is a good outcome (mostly the no patent suits part), but it doesn't quite stand up in practice because patent suits cost money, and bigger companies can sue you longer than you can sue them. I don't want a world where MAD is the default, because the large companies carry nukes, and I carry a peashooter.

I will no longer use react on any new projects.

[chrisco255]

The clause states you only lose the patent rights if YOU sue Facebook for patent infringement (and only for patent infringement, not other reasons).

As pointed out by Dennis Walsh in (https://medium.com/@dwalsh.sdlr/react-facebook-and-the-revok...), it would take millions to bring a patent suit against Facebook.

[hardwaresofton]

Yeah, and if Facebook DOES infringe on a patent you own, and it's a valid case? You then have to rewrite your frontend code base as fast as you can?

At it's best this is like some sort of warped "you infringe on my patents and I'll infringe on yours" kind of thing, assuming MAD means it doesn't become a very-uneven suing war. This case is also bad news, because larger companies are much more capable of infringing on your patents and competing with smaller companies in a conglomerate style.

Amazon is a conglomerate. Alphabet/Google is a conglomerate. Somehow, everyone in the government who manages anti-trust (whether that should be a thing is another debate), seems to be asleep at the wheel, literally everyday.

Also, guess who has lots of resources to rebuild a shitty copy of ingenuous software they found online? Big corporations do. All the starry eyed CS grads who want to go work for Big Conglomerate Co. are going to be rearing to re-implement Redis in 50K LOC, but it's harder for some small company (or just random open source project) to re-build the parts of their app that used react in some other framework.

[unscaled]

If you are a small shop, you just don't have the money to file a patent claim against Facebook. That's exactly what the parent post told you: patent litigation is expensive.

The PATENTS file is red herring. If you're a small player and you launch a patent lawsuit against Facebook you stand no chance of winning. Facebook has thousands of patents in its portfolio, and software patents being broad as they are, you're invariably infringing one of them.

You know what, scrap that. Even if you were a somewhat large player with your own respectable patent portfolio, and Facebook had almost no patents you could never win. Why? Because this already happened, dear internet:

https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/23/facebook-patent-fortress/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/facebook-...

TLDR: Yahoo sued Facebook before their IPO with 10 infringed patents (not just 1), trying to scare Facebook into giving them money. Facebook only had 56 patents, but they had money, so they bought up 1400 more patents, and countersued with just 10 of them. Yahoo realized they don't have the money to win a lawsuit against Facebook, and meekly submitted and cross-licensed the patents to Facebook.

Now imagine trying to copy cat the Yahoo move with two guys in a garage who own just a single patent against a stronger and more prepared Facebook that has thousands.

[hardwaresofton]

You might have responded to the wrong post -- I completely agree (I think I'm the parent poster you're referring to) :)

To give this comment meaningful content:

https://mithril.js.org/

https://vuejs.org/

https://www.nativescript.org/

[vonmoltke]

> Yeah, and if Facebook DOES infringe on a patent you own, and it's a valid case? You then have to rewrite your frontend code base as fast as you can?

In that case, you have two other options:

* Quietly swap out your frontend before you file

* Continue using React and dare Facebook to produce a patent they can actually claim

This, of course, is based on the assumption that your frontend is a significant portion of your product. If your frontend is a trivial portion, then "rewrite your frontend code base as fast as you can" is also trivial.

Edit: fixed formatting

[yoz-y]

This is something I have yet to understand. From all I read about the patent situation in America it looks like they are totally worthless unless you are a multi million company. Is there actually no way of pursuing a giant if they infringe on your IP?

[TimTheTinker]

For the most part, yes, unless you're a non-practicing entity (patent troll).

Large companies carry massive war chests of patents, such that anyone who makes software is most likely violating several of them without knowing it. They defend themselves from patent lawsuits with countersuits from their war chests. (Trolls are immune, though, because they don't make software and therefore aren't infringing in the first place.)

[hardwaresofton]

The patent situation is broken in a ton of ways. Just think about the concept for a few minutes and you'll imagine many of the points.

As for the problem you're focusing on, the particular problem is that to actually your patent defensively (the original purpose), you must litigate. To litigate, you must have lawyers, and quite a bit of money. If the other side is capable of buying better lawyers, or lawyers for a longer time, you lose.

[chrisco255]

I think most in the software community abhor patents for software, so it's probably a good thing that this "mutually assured destruction" environment exists.

[true_religion]

> the problem is that companies aren't scared of open source writers suing them.

They should be. Many popular open source projects are supported by a 'community' of large companies, or are invested into a widely respected foundation like Apache.

Additionally, many projects that started off as simply a few developers, grow to the point that a company is founded to handle support and customization. An example of this would be Redis Labs---started by the originator of Redis.

If even tiny patent trolls can be 'dangerous' to multinationals, I expect most would steer clear of declaring a patent war on the community at large.

What if Postgres had a retaliatory patent clause?

What if Linux did?

[hardwaresofton]

I think copy-left is good enough.

Also, you're right except for the fact that lots of very very useful projects are not backed by large companies or foundations like apache. What you describe a solution is precisely the world I don't want to live in. I don't want the MAD state of things to be held in check by large organizations -- humans kind of forget themselves in large organizations, far too easily.

Redis is a great success story, but again, that organization is way way weaker than facebook. They just have more money in the bank, and MAD only works if EVERYONE has nukes. It doesn't work if one side is carrying rifles and only one side has nukes.

Maybe we should fix the patent system instead -- I'm aware it's hugely nuanced, but for all the griping that tech does, surprisingly nothing has changed -- the tech companies that make it just don't seem to be trying to change the system once they're established (someone please correct me if I'm wrong).

[foota]

I agree this is hypothetical, but an organization could form for enforcing the license.

[hardwaresofton]

This is exactly what I don't want it to come to. That's just a corporate arms race, and I can promise you open source is not going to win.

Instead of forming organizations to fight patent wars, just put effort towards fixing the patent problems.