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by evmar 4146 days ago
This looks really neat! As the post suggests, we also have been doing a lot of janky Log calls to debug our app's network code.

I am really impressed by a lot of the Facebook open source releases. Each new one makes me even sadder that you can't use them due to the crazy patent license they've started using:

https://github.com/facebook/stetho/blob/master/PATENTS

"The license granted hereunder will terminate, automatically and without notice, for anyone that makes any claim (including by filing any lawsuit, assertion or other action) alleging [...] that any right in any patent claim of Facebook is invalid or unenforceable."

2 comments

I was going to write a rebuttal saying that it's unlikely that any of this specific Software [Stetho] is covered by patent claims, so it wouldn't matter if you lost the license to Facebook's patents.

But then I saw this: http://stks.freshpatents.com/Facebook-Inc-nm1.php

314 patents in 2014, 69 just since the start of 2015. That's... just absurd.

It wouldn't matter if this was covered or not. Their license is saying that you can use their stuff as long as you don't question any of their patents.
Github would earn a lot of respect if they simply disallowed that sort of license for anything hosted with them.
Downvotes? Really? Github could make a stand here and disallow licenses that evil and self-serving. With this license, anybody who even uses this software can't challenge any patents of Facebook's. If Github said no, this is wrong, they would set an example for everyone else and single this out as the terrible license it is.
Downvotes because its rather impractical, and Im sure many people don't want GitHub to start arbitrarily banning projects because of a random set of beliefs they have.

And then you have people that pay money to GitHub for code hosting...

But Github here is in the position where they are the only external party that could do something about this, because the code is hosted on their site.

> ... Im sure many people don't want GitHub to start arbitrarily banning projects because of a random set of beliefs they have

It wouldn't be unprecedented and it wouldn't be arbitrary. Google Code, for instance, only allows open source projects to be hosted with them. From what I can tell about Github, they allow any license. Doesn't mean that they can't change that policy.

Sure, it's easier to do nothing. But they alone could do something. And Facebook will get the goodwill they want from this without much kickback because nobody does anything.

Just an honest question: What's the benefit of using this over the adb bridge and debug bridge to debug code on-the-fly?
The biggest difference is you dont need to add debug code deploy, you just connect.

For things like the network traffic it is really hard to see request/response for a particular thing.

For the dumpers - those are basically a main method inside your program that you can run whenever. Its a nice way to change (or dump) state of the program, similar to adb shell dumpsys, but also allows a richer interface for changing state.

That's a great explanation. Thank you. Doesn't it cause problems not being able to pause the execution of the programme?