>I was surprised because my first impression was that this clause does not legally do anything more, anything less than a license that does not explicitly grant

>I was surprised because my first impression was that this clause does not legally do anything more, anything less than a license that does not explicitly grants the rights to use the related software patents anyway. But I can imagine that without an explicit mention, a judge could still decide that a user receiving a program could reasonably feel allowed to use the related patents from its authors. Yes, many lawyers believe in implicit patent license: http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Implicit_patent_licence http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Implicit_patent_licence