[License-discuss] Views on React licensing?

[Lawrence Rosen]

John Cowan wrote:

> what, is MIT so incompetent they haven't kept track of what patent licenses they have issued? Apprarently so.

 

Competence wasn't the real issue. The legal and technical effort required by any large organization to avoid incompatible patent license grants can be huge. Instead they said simply: "Here is this copyrighted work. Use it. It is open source."

 

Nowadays, software patents are harder to obtain and even those who work in universities, research organizations and large companies want their software to be more fully open source with broader patent grants and lower patent risks to the public. Most now use the Apache or MPL or GPLv3 licenses. 

 

The subject of this thread is "Views on React licensing?" It should be "Views on patent licensing?"

 

/Larry

 

 

From: License-discuss [mailto:license-discuss-bounces at opensource.org] On Behalf Of John Cowan
Sent: Monday, December 12, 2016 11:29 AM
To: license-discuss at opensource.org
Cc: henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi
Subject: Re: [License-discuss] Views on React licensing?

 

 

On Mon, Dec 12, 2016 at 12:19 PM, Simon Phipps <simon at webmink.com <mailto:simon at webmink.com> > wrote:

 

Do you have a citation to support that please? A quick web search did not identify one, but obviously it's a big web out there.

 

I don't, but it was on one of the OSI mailing lists during the discussion of the Brode license (which ended up not being approved).  The Brode license provided that any pre-existing patent grant by MIT pre-empted rights granted under the license, which a lot of us really didn't like -- what, is MIT so incompetent they haven't kept track of what patent licenses they have issued? Apprarently so.   At that point several of us pointed out that the much older MIT license already contained a universal patent grant; the MIT folks said "We never meant it to."


-- 

John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org <mailto:cowan at ccil.org> 

We call nothing profound that is not wittily expressed.

        --Northrop Frye (improved)

 

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