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My understanding is that if a company open sources a patent protected code (with one of the standard open source licenses without any additional patent clauses)
by mixedbit 9y ago
My understanding is that if a company open sources a patent protected code (with one of the standard open source licenses without any additional patent clauses), the company grants anyone the right to use the patented technique without any obligations to the company. Otherwise we would see many cases of code released on liberal licenses, such as MIT, that no one is allowed to use, unless they pay for the patents separately.
- viraptor 9y agoThat's definitely not the case. Some licenses like Apache-2 explicitly grant you the use of necessary patents. Others do not. And there are projects which are absolutely covered by patents, yet the code is opensource. That was the situation with Gif and MP3 formats for years. I was involved with an opensource project which got a patent application submitted by the company. Even though I pointed out prior art. And even though I refused to sign the application as one of the authors. That's corporate environment for you.
- mixedbit 9y agoAs far as I know GIF and MP3 decoders were made open source not by the patent holders, if the patent holders open sourced the decoders, would they be able to enforce the patent rights?
- HelloNurse 9y agoThe license of an open source implementation is granted by the authors and allows you to make copies and derivative works, while a patent grant comes from the patent holder and allows you to actually use the software. They are two completely independent things.