Comment by eli
3 days ago
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.