Re: Royalty-free Patent Policies for Open Source?

[Ernest Prabhakar]

Hi Larry,

You wrote:

The patent grants in most open source licenses are fully compatible with
the W3C patent policy. The patent grants in the OSL and AFL are *not*
tied to specific implementations and are broader than the W3C patent grant.

I understand they may be compatible, but I'm not clear how they guarantee compliance.

Can you help me understand what you mean by that? When I see:

   2) Grant of Patent License. Licensor hereby grants
   You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual,
   non-sublicenseable license, under patent claims owned or
   controlled by the Licensor that are embodied in the Original
   Work as furnished by the Licensor ("Licensed Claims") to make,
   use, sell and offer for sale the Original Work.  Licensor
   hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive,
   perpetual, non-sublicenseable license under the Licensed Claims
   to make, use, sell and offer for sale Derivative Works.

I assume that means a "Derivative Works" is covered by the patent grant, but an Independent Work, with similar functionality, would not be.

That is, just because (say) IBM released a piece of source code covered by the OSL which implemented a patented algorithm in, does that mean I (in a commercial application) could freely write my own code that used that same patent? If not, how does that automatically satisfy the W3C criteria?

-- Ernie P.

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