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Comment by adambrenecki | Hacker News Reader

Wait, so they're replacing a license that has a dodgy patent grant that everyone distrusted, with a license that doesn't have a patent grant at all? Why not Apache?

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To quote a comment in a similar thread, apparently there's such a thing as an implied patent license:

Implied patent licenses:

https://www.wilmerhale.com/pages/publicationsandnewsdetail.a....

https://copyleft.org/guide/comprehensive-gpl-guidech7.html

Basically, if you sell or license a product that requires a patent to work, courts have generally held that you grant an implied patent license for any patents that the product might require. If you explicitly reference patents within the license, however, then whatever terms you explicitly write into the license supersede this implied patent license. BSD+patents (and Apache 2) have explicit patent language; paradoxically, this makes them more restrictive than licenses like MIT, BSD, or GPL that don't mention patents at all.

Yeah, exactly, what does this actually accomplish besides putting the user in a worse situation where they are no longer given any sort of patent grant?

At least it might give the louder parts of the community that have been consistently complaining about this issue a good reason to stop shouting quite as much

Because an unspecified parent grant is most likely an implied patent grant, and especially for FOSS there is a very strong case since your are explicitly permitted to study, modify, and use any part of the code.

Probably because they have no patents that cover the concepts these libraries introduce. Perhaps wit some of the others they will go Apache v2. People have been so worked up by the FUD that Facebook can't even relicense under MIT one of the de facto open source licenses without being met with suspicion.

> Probably because they have no patents that cover the concepts these libraries introduce.

Apache 2.0 certainly doesn't require you to have patents in order to use it ("applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s)")

They have the patent: https://www.google.com/patents/US20170221242. Just MIT is a good option, I don't really understand why they don't want to "fix" the patent grant to be like Apache 2.0 or Google's. Why relicense everything when fixing 1 sentence would fix the problem completely.

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