On Tue, 2004-02-17 at 20:20, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
No, the patent (if there was one) would be an additional restriction on the GPL. The Apache License itself is not the patent and does not restrict the GPL any more than the GPL would have been restricted by the patent absent the Apache License.
Let me make a more limited, but far more convoluted, claim:
"Code incorporating patents (when the code and contributors' patents are
licensed solely under the Apache License Version 2.0) cannot be
(safely?) incorporated into a derivative work distributed under GPLv2,
because any recipient who receives a copy of such a derivative work is
required to refrain from alleging infringement of any of his own patents
incorporated into the original Apache-License-only code. (That
requirement is more strict than the GPL's requirement to license the
patent for GPL use.)"
Allow me to make a less convoluted translation:
"Code incorporating patents, when the code and contributors' patents are licensed solely under the MIT license, cannot be incorporated into a derivative work distributed under GPLv2, because any recipient who receives a copy of such a derivative work has no rights to use any of the patents incorporated into the original MIT code."
Why, then, is the MIT license compatible with the GPL?
....Roy
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