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by tomelders 3047 days ago
More importantly, you have more protection with the BSD+Patent Grant than with BSD alone.

With BSD alone, if you infringe on a Facebook patent then you are vulnerable to legal action from Facebook if they deem that you’ve infringed your patent. And regardless of wether you’d infringed or not, such action would still cost a lot of money to fight in court and would cripple most businesses.

People who claim it risks giving up their IP are ignoring the brutal truth that software patents are shit, and if you’re in the software business you’re pretty much guaranteed to be infringing someone elses bullshit patent.

The BSD+Patent Grant was designed to combat the patent trolls, but people lost their minds and now it’s gone.

The BSD licence is objectively worse than the BSD+Patent Grant. If you opposed it, then the only people you’ve helped are the patent trolls.

2 comments

> The BSD licence is objectively worse than the BSD+Patent Grant.

I'm not a lawyer, but I have heard a few claim the opposite: BSD plus the explicit restricted patent grant was worse than BSD (or MIT) with no explicit patent grant (because many believe it carries an implicit unrestricted patent grant).

It does not look like this was ever tested by actual court case so I guess it is hard to argue either way.
Please leave such opinions to actual lawyers.

Apache placed React's BSD + PATENTS in "Category-X", banning it from being used in Apache projects:

https://react-etc.net/entry/apache-foundation-bans-use-of-fa...

> The BSD+Patent Grant was designed to combat the patent trolls, but people lost their minds and now it’s gone.

It was designed for Facebook to fight patent trolls, but not for you. In comparison with saner license like Apache 2.0, Facebook's license only applied to Facebook.

> The BSD licence is objectively worse than the BSD+Patent Grant.

That is false. Please read up on "implicit patents license".

The issue the Apache Foundation had with the license was that it was incompatible with the Apache license; they weren't making a value judgement about it being good, bad, strong, or weak. Many other excellent licenses are also in "Category-X".
> Apache placed React's BSD + PATENTS in "Category-X", banning it from being used in Apache projects:

The GPL, LGPL, and AGPL are also in that list, so by itself this isn't much of an indictment of the license itself.

https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-x

Please leave such opinions to actual lawyers.