John, my responses below. This is not legal advice! :-) /Larry
From: John Cowan [mailto:co...@ccil.org] Sent: Monday, December 12, 2016 12:58 PM To: lro...@rosenlaw.com; license-discuss@opensource.org Subject: Re: [License-discuss] Views on React licensing? On Mon, Dec 12, 2016 at 2:55 PM, Lawrence Rosen <lro...@rosenlaw.com <mailto:lro...@rosenlaw.com> > wrote: Competence wasn't the real issue. The legal and technical effort required by any large organization to avoid incompatible patent license grants can be huge. Instead they said simply: "Here is this copyrighted work. Use it. It is open source." Then how does MIT know that it hasn't granted exclusive patent licenses to the same patent to both Yoyodyne Inc. and Soylent Corp.? If they have no proper records, that would be a pretty pickle for all three. [<LER>] MIT's problems with "exclusive patent licenses" are for them to resolve with their exclusive licensees. I'm concerned only with their promises to the public under the open source MIT license, and that includes my right to *use* that software. If Yoyodyne or Soylent sue MIT because they had previous exclusive patent licenses or contracts, that is court fun for them. It doesn't involve me. And since a patent is specifically the right to prevent use by anyone else, how can they say "Use it" when they mean "If you use it and Yoyodyne sues you for infringement of our (original) patent, it's your problem"? [<LER>] I would tell Yoyodyne to take up their dispute with MIT. I'm not a party. The worldwide open source user community is not a party to some secret exclusive deal between Yoyodyne and MIT. /Larry
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