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You forgot to quote this part: > The reason people use explicit patent grants is to avoid getting into some unsettled law. Particularly, the sublicensability o
by cwyers 12y ago
You forgot to quote this part:
> The reason people use explicit patent grants is to avoid getting into some unsettled law. Particularly, the sublicensability of implied patent licenses is not clear. The TL;DR of this is "the answer is clear if you get the software directly from person owning the patents. If you get it through someone else, like say, a linux distribution, it's not clear what happens". The related doctrine of "patent exhaustion" that plays into this is also not settled, and currently the subject of a Supreme Court cert petition by Cisco.
- pron 12y agoIf you read the whole thing, what he's talking about there are licenses, like Apache, that explicitly grant those patents that are only implicitly granted by the MIT and BSD licenses (and even that, he says down the page, does not really solve the sublicensing problem). But Microsoft's explicit grant does not clarify the grant implicit in the MIT license (as the Apache license does) but restricts it, beyond even the minimum bar for being considered open source. So, if you ask: "do I have permission to use the CLR source code as I wish, as long as I comply with the MIT license?" the answer is a resounding no, Microsoft does not grant you that permission (true, they might not have the specific patent to go after you, but they might, too, and they don't have to tell you).
- wvenable 12y agoFor any open source project you can violate a patent completely unrelated to the author and be sued just the same. Heck, Microsoft probably makes money from Android than Google does.