Chris Reed
Aug 22, 2017 · 2 min read

I genuinely want to leave this forum with a solution or at least a quantification of the cost of using Facebook’s BSD+P. I’m also not a lawyer or anything like that, but I think that are some flaws in your argument.

A patent lawsuit worth filing takes resources. A timeframe from as low as 6 moths to as much as 4 years. and costs from $300,000 to $5 million.

You should be able to remove React from your codebase for under $100,000 and in less than 5 months.

So it would very slightly impact the costs of that scenario. Especially when you consider that the median patent damages and costs are on the rise.

The second point you make also has a flaw. The idea that just because no one else is doing it, it is bad. There were a few parts in the article where it felt like you made unjustified leaps of faith. Like your understanding of why Facebook wants everyone else to use their BSD+P.

I think that Facebook wants other companies to adopt this practice to protect themselves. In the same way that I want you to wear a seatbelt. It doesn’t impact my safety; I just hope that you do it for you own safety. If there were more financial safety in open sourcing, perhaps more would do it.

I view it as an experiment. Maybe we will all get hurt really badly by BSD+P. Maybe it is the end of open source, but maybe not. Right now regarding React. I think that the risk is low enough to not worry about. Even if you are a start up.

I would love to be convinced otherwise, but in a way that is rational not hypothetical. With an expert understanding of the many layers of costs, timelimes, resources, properties, and precedents.

I left “timelimes” in there. I thought it was funny.

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