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Discussion on: Explain Facebook's BSD+patents license like I'm five

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

The one that still gets to me is React Native. In a way, much more so than React in the first place. React Native would be so much harder to replace if you needed to. Even under the worst circumstances, you could swap React under the hood because, as Google v Oracle demonstrated, it doesn't seem like you can't hope to patent an API.

On the other hand, your odds of needing to sue Facebook over this sort of thing are probably pretty slim if you're not a major competing tech company, so practically speaking it never really affected a whole lot of people.

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mortoray profile image
edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y

It's not just about your need to sue, it's about some other startup's need to sue. If everybody ignored the restrictions on licenses you'd end up with an ecosystem entirely dominated by these lopsided terms.

Such an ecosystem can be extremely harmful to innovators. Say a new startup has an actual patentable idea and goes to create software around it. If 99% of all products are ecumbered by bad licenses they'll find it impossible to implement their software, or the cost of reimplementation will be too high.

These aggressive licenses have this negative effect of excluding future ventures from entering the market place, even if they aren't related to any of the original licensors markets.