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IANAL What if MS retracted its promise? Would the retraction be retroactive? A license is usually perpetual and non-revocable, with causes for revocation being

IANAL What if MS retracted its promise? Would the retraction be retroactive? A license is usually perpetual and non-revocable, with causes for revocation being written into the license itself (side note: RMS is not infallible, and my zeal for making everything Copyleft has mellowed, but I still find the wording of the GPL to be pure genius). Has a "patent promise" been tested in court? The GPL has been tested and upheld in some jurisdictions, perhaps most notably in the BusyBox cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#GPL_lawsuits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#GPL_lawsuits

yyyk 6y ago
According to the "In re Spansion" case[0], a patent promise is equivalent to a licence. Given that and the MIT licence, I don't see much of any way for MS to abuse patents against .NET users (IANAL). Amusingly, Apple itself was the beneficiary of the ruling. Speaking of Apple, given its history it's not impossible to imagine a closed source "Swift 6" with no backward compatibility, leaving only a very tiny ecosystem for the open source Swift. [0] https://patentlyo.com/patent/2013/01/3rd-circuit-covenant-not-to-sue-is-a-license-and-therefore-not-dischargeable-in-bankruptcy.html https://patentlyo.com/patent/2013/01/3rd-circuit-covenant-no...