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Yes, you're right that "BSD+patent"+"revoked patent grant because you sued Facebook over another patent" is pretty much the same as just BSD from the start. Licensing software you know you have patents on under BSD only with no patent grant would be pretty awful, of course.

If Facebook wanted to be the good guys here they would license under Apache 2.0 or write their own symmetric patent grant. They already relicensed RocksDB after Apache's move, perhaps they will do the rest of their stuff too.



> "BSD+patent"+"revoked patent grant because you sued Facebook over another patent" is pretty much the same as just BSD from the start.

Not really. If you have BSD with no patent grants you can at least argue that there's an implicit patent grant. If there's an explicit patent grant which you violated/got terminated that defence is clearly not going to fly.


I'm not a lawyer but my understanding is the case for an implicit patent grant with BSD is pretty weak.




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