> Lastly, as a result of this mishmash of legal, industry, general-intellectual-property, and general-use terms, it isn’t clear whether The MIT License includes

> Lastly, as a result of this mishmash of legal, industry, general-intellectual-property, and general-use terms, it isn’t clear whether The MIT License includes a patent license. The general language “deal in” and some of the example verbs, especially “use”, point toward a patent license, albeit a very unclear one. I think this is a very carefully couched way of saying "the MIT license doesn't protect the licensee from being sued by the licensor for patent violation." If person A has a patent on algorithm X, and he wrote open source code which implements X, and he licenses this code to person B under the MIT (or BSD) license, and B uses the code, it's feasible for A to sue B for patent violation. For this reason alone, I think MIT and BSD are awful, archaic licenses that should be avoided at all costs. The Apache 2.0 license is a great substitute.