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.
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.