Comment by eli
Wouldn't the patent still be a problem with the standard BSD license? BSD would grant you license to redistribute the software but not necessarily the patent rights to use it.
Wouldn't the patent still be a problem with the standard BSD license? BSD would grant you license to redistribute the software but not necessarily the patent rights to use it.
Good point. I remembered the 3 clauses correctly but forgot the first sentence mentions "use" along with redistribution. IANAL but it seems common sense that "use is permitted" implies some sort of patent license. Seems tricky though -- do the people I redistribute my modified version to also get a license? Could I avoid needing a patent license for my unrelated project if I embed Concrete?
Concrete's lawyers must believe that BSD doesn't grant patent rights. The Concrete license.txt is straight BSD, but the Readme says it only applies in certain situations. So is it BSD licensed or not? If that statement about patents in the Readme is load-bearing then what's stopping me from forking the project and removing it?
The BSD license is available to the general public, so everyone you could redistribute to already has a license.
In the linked post, they say, "the original BSD3 license did not mention patents at all, creating an ambiguity that the BSD3-clear version resolves", which has an additional clause beginning, "NO EXPRESS OR IMPLIED LICENSES TO ANY PARTY'S PATENT RIGHTS ARE GRANTED BY THIS LICENSE." Presumably if Metacarta's lawyers really did believe that BSD doesn't grant patent rights as they claim, they wouldn't have gone to the trouble to edit it to remove that implicit grant. And if Concrete's lawyers really did believe it, they probably would have gone with the actual open-source license everyone recognizes.
The BSD license permits redistribution and use, with or without modification. This permission is conditional on a copyright-related thing (among other things), but there's nothing suggesting that the license is limited to copyright-related rights. If someone grants you a BSD license to their software and then sues you for patent infringement for redistributing or using it, it seems like they'd be likely to lose the lawsuit because they granted you a license to do what you're doing.
On the other hand, there's nothing explicitly stating that the permission is intended to extend to practicing the patents embodied in the software. That's just an inference any reasonable person would draw from the language of the license. It may be better to state it explicitly, as the Apache license does.
But it may be worse, because longer licenses contain more to argue over, and once you start listing the particular causes of action you're promising not to sue for, you may miss some. Suppose your program is for chemistry and includes a list of solubility parameters for different compounds. If someone copies that, that's a potential cause of action under national laws implementing the sui generis database rights in the EU Database Protection directive: https://www.eumonitor.eu/9353000/1/j4nvk6yhcbpeywk_j9vvik7m1... which postdates the authorship of the BSD license and isn't mentioned in the Apache License 2.0 either. Plausibly the explicit listing of copyright rights and patent rights in the license will incline courts to decide that no license to database rights was intended.
Some future legislation will presumably create new intellectual property restrictions we currently can't imagine, even if it also removes some of the ones we currently suffer from.
(A separate issue is that the patent holder may not be the person who granted the license or indeed have contributed in any way to the creation of the BSD-licensed software, which is just as much of a problem with the Apache license.)
Issues like these require thoughtful deliberation, and unfortunately the Reddit format adopted by HN makes that impossible—in fact, the editing and replying deadlines added for HN make it a medium even less amenable to such discussions.