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Implicit grants have very little case law and what law there is doesn't look too useful for people in this case (the patent(s) would have to be extremely specif
by abritinthebay 9y ago
Implicit grants have very little case law and what law there is doesn't look too useful for people in this case (the patent(s) would have to be extremely specifically applicable to the code, which most patents are designed not to be).
So I trust implicit grants much less than explicit.
- jjnoakes 9y agoRight, if they were equal grants, I would too. But they aren't, that's the point.
- abritinthebay 9y agoIt's a principled stand for sure, and I can respect that, but it also means that in practice you get less protection. Like, I'd love to live in a world where patent protection wasn't even an issue but we don't. So in this situation we end up with less protection due to compatibility concerns. Given we do live in a world where software patents are valuable to companies and they won't all want to give blanket irrevocable licenses... there has to be a way for business to do that and protect users of the software. The patent grant FB did was a (flawed) attempt at that.
- jjnoakes 9y agoNot sure how the topic veered; this thread was about the difference between BSD+Patents - Patents vs MIT and the two being less equal (in my opinion) than first posited, because the +Patents and -Patents don't cancel out to equal the implicit patent grant of MIT. Even if you believe the implicit grant to be weak, or Facebook's Patent grant to be better than an implicit grant, the above discussion stands independently of those things.