GitLab freezes GraphQL project amid looming Facebook patent fears

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 …

[Notas Badoff]

Defense and deafness

"... that they think is a valuable part of their defensive portfolio because of its broad applicability."

So they're lots of people all angsty because of the patents clause. And they each would swear they would never be party to suing Facebook, so why the "hostile action" by Facebook?

And then their company gets taken over by someone. And then another takeover. And a few steps later they find out their 'feelings' don't mean nothing, and there's a someone looking only at what their technology is worth in patentable ideas. You don't even count as cannon-fodder at that point, but your work could be used offensively in a patent war.

Now how do you prevent this being possible? Because Facebook apparently is looking at the world as being a bit more, well, angsty, than you do.

BTW: This obviously does not apply to that open source where a company is not declaring ownership of a product. If it can be or has been turned over to a community governance or whatever, then there is no one - no company - who would be suing Facebook, right? So I'm really rather confused at these pure open source projects getting confused at this. Or can you tell me who would be suing Facebook and get into this problem. A 'foundation'?

[ecofeco]

I uh

Wut? WTF?

[Mephistro]

Facebook trying to do the right thing?

WHAT KIND OF WIZARDRY IS THIS!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Facebook trying to do the right thing?

They aren't actually trying to do the right thing - they're just trying to give the appearance of doing the right thing.

[Lysenko]

RocksDB isn't an original FarceBork product, it's a fork of Google's BSD licensed LevelDB.

[Anonymous Coward]

If they release the source implementation into the public domain before being granted a patent

aren't they then creating prior art which defeats the patent itself ?

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: If they release the source implementation into the public domain before being granted a patent

Maybe yes, maybe no.

The key thing is the dates

1) Of the release of the source code

2) And the date of Filing the patent application

If 2) is before 1) then No

if 1) is before 2) then yes and someone in Farcebook will be getting their pink slip pretty soon.

The USA moved to a 'First to File' system some years ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

mm, graphql looks familiar

not knowing what graphql was, went looking and it looks familiar.

Seems they reinvented xml schemas in javascript?

so how the fuck does a it get a patent?

[l8gravely]

Re: mm, graphql looks familiar

You'd think Alice would hold here... since a language is just a way of describing mathematics. On a computer.