"They "trust me". Dumb fucks"

--Mark Zuckerberg, President and Founder of Facebook (source)

Summary: Yet another major player walks away from Facebook's code because of software patents

THE history of Facebook when it comes to patents is anything but relieving.

Facebook's dirty patent games have in fact just driven away another company. We didn't write much about this controversy until recently (relegated to our daily links), but now that the cautionary tale grows wings we decided it's worth a mention. Last night there was another new example of this, with Gitlab being the latest to walk away. As The Register put it:

Using GraphQL, an increasingly popular query language for grabbing data, may someday infringe upon pending Facebook patents, making the technology inherently problematic for corporate usage.

In an analysis posted to Medium and in a related discussion in the GraphQL repo on GitHub, attorney and developer Dennis Walsh observed that Facebook's GraphQL specification doesn't include a patent license. In other words: using GraphQL in your software may lead to your code infringing a Facebook-held patent on the technology in future.

“The patents (as of a few weeks ago) were granted but not issued,” said Walsh in an email to The Register today. ”Damages can start before issuance but litigation cannot. But post-issuance, the threat is very real. My reading of two GraphQL granted applications and the GraphQL spec is that any properly implemented GraphQL server infringes.”

What's pleasing to see here is that fairly large companies, not just individual developers, are willing to throw away code because of patent clauses. Spectators should take that for a sign that software patents have no room in software development. There's a price to be paid for clinging onto them. ⬆