Raúl Kripalani
Aug 22, 2017 · 2 min read

Just a few notes I drafted quickly.

  1. It has been clear from the outset that the object of revocation is only the patent right grant, not the copyright license. This is not a contentious point, so it was irrelevant (even if some lawyers claim otherwise, because they consider PATENTS to be an annex of LICENSE, and the PATENTS rider is laxly worded).
  2. Again, you make a point where there was no controversy whatsoever: defensive termination. I perceive these two arguments as a smokescreen.
  3. You state that ASLv2, MPL, CDDL, etc. incorporate “stronger protections”. This is incorrect. First of all, you need to indicate the directionality of the protections. Protect whom? The licensor or the licensee? I assume the licensor.
  4. ASLv2 and CDDL incorporate weak patent retaliation, so by no means are they stronger than FB’s.
  5. MPL incorporates weak patent retaliation + copyright license revocation after 60 days. But those revocations only occur if you sue the project itself, not the company in its entirety for anything patent-related like with strong patent retaliation (you don’t even need to sue, an accusation is enough with FB’s license). I explained this in my follow-up article. Check out the point about MPL.

You then make personal conclusions that are incorrect, I respond to each of your conclusions:

  1. Yes, Facebook is unethical. Their entire platform is built on OSS that didn’t impose the predatory terms they do. The ASF has rejected this license and the OSI has not approved it.
  2. I never told startups to “avoid today’s standard frontend framework”. Wow, you do make a lot cheeky claims there. There are more options, you know? And pretty good ones.
  3. “Bad advice to tell startups to move away from React, they should focus on their business”? RnD? Participate? Come on. That’s a whole lot of red herring arguments.
  4. No other company has adopted FB’s license model. I think that speaks for itself.

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Raúl Kripalani

Written by

🎈 Engineer @ Protocol Labs, working on libp2p. Previously: ConsenSys, Red Hat, FuseSource, Atos, freelance. From Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain.

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