[stupidcar]

I think everyone, including those who agitated against Facebook's original patent license, understands and agrees that patent licenses are important and should be encouraged.

Where the original patent license was perhaps "worse", in an ethical if not legal way, than no license at all, was that its limitations were non-obvious, and there was a feeling, right or wrong, that Facebook were attempting to restrict developers' rights by stealth. Licenses without any patent grant are problematic and uncertain, but they are at least problematic and uncertain in an obvious way, if that makes sense.

The original patent license felt akin to the Microsoft's early attempts at "shared source" versions of their libraries and frameworks, where just reading the source code could theoretically curtail developers' ability to work on open source implementations.

I think it's natural that people will react more negatively and forcibly to these kind of apparent bad-faith actions than to simple omissions. Furthermore, taking an aggressive stand against these sort of license tripwires hopefully makes it much less likely that others will attempt to insert similar clauses in future.