Someone found this buried in the terms and conditions of tiktok and is saying that it somehow means Facebook owns it.
What is this actually supposed to be telling me?
BSD 3-clause “New” or “Revised” License (facebook/network-connection-class)
Copyright © 2015, Facebook, Inc. All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
- Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
- Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
- Neither the name Facebook nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
It just means tiktok is using some open source library that facebook developed. In this case it’s this: https://github.com/facebookarchive/network-connection-class
what was it attached to specifically? software will use libraries from other companies. this is basically - facebook developed some library. you can use it as long as you include this notice, and dont say facebook endorses it
and is saying that it somehow means Facebook owns it
owns what?
It does mean that Facebook owns the copyright to a software component that TikTok (apparently) also uses. They licensed it under a free and open source software license, so anybody (including TikTok, including you, including me) can download it and use it as part of their own software. It does not mean Facebook owns TikTok, nor that Facebook owns any other piece of software this is used in.
If you want to see more examples of similar notices: if you are using Firefox, enter about:license into your URL bar. If you are using Chrome, enter chrome://credits/ there. You’ll find that these browsers, like many pieces of software nowadays, rely heavily on open source components developed by third parties.
This is essentially a quick rundown of open-source software licensing. The notice is saying that the TikTok app uses some software that is owned by Facebook, but that Facebook has irrevocably licensed the software such that anyone (including you or TikTok) can use and distribute that software for free, provided they follow the few rules in the BSD 3-clause license, which has three clauses: 1) include these three clauses with any source code copy of Facebook’s software, 2) include these three clauses in the docs bundled with any compiled app that uses Facebook’s software, and 3) do not use Facebook’s name in a way that implies an endorsement or affiliation with Facebook.
TikTok can continue using that particular version of Facebook’s software until the heat death of the universe, and Facebook can never come back later and demand payment from TikTok or you or anyone for that software. But Facebook is still considered the owner, because they retain the right to relicense the software under different terms, perhaps with a license that doesn’t require including the copyright notice, for example. Likewise, Facebook has the right to sue to enforce the BSD 3-clause terms against anyone who isn’t abiding by those terms. But it looks like TikTok is abiding, since they posted the full BSD 3-clause terms, so Facebook can’t complain.
Note: Facebook could change the license for later versions of the software, but any versions prior would be unaffected. Integrating any software commercially always requires checking the license terms, and while open-source software has fairly standardized terms, diligence is still important and licenses do occasionally change.
It just means that tiktok is using a software component that was developed by facebook and that is publicly available for everyone to use.
You want to use it too in a project of yours? You can, but you have to add that license text somewhere!
This doesn’t mean that anyone owns anything, open source software is full of these so-called “libraries” that people reuse in order to not reinvent the wheel constantly.
