[copyleft-next] covered by patent grant

Mike Linksvayer ml at gondwanaland.com
Thu Aug 7 02:23:17 UTC 2014


Part of http://faif.us/cast/2014/aug/05/0x4B/ with Fontana and VanL
concerned a desire for patent grant covering more than just
contributor's contributions/in combination with work, or whole work at
time of contributor's contributions (as I [mis]understand them, Apache2
and EPL do former, MPL2 and GPL3 latter).

This reminded me to look at copyleft-next again. I assume it is intended
to do latter, that is

    "My Code" means the particular work of authorship I license to You
    under this License.

refers to my contributor version, not the code contributed by me?

Near the end of the podcast Bradley said (roughly) that if free software
license patent grants aren't covering enough, the those licenses should
be fixed. As opposed to using CLAs which offer more coverage -- in
theory, though it was noted they usually don't -- any examples that do?

I was kind of hoping that I'd discover recent copyleft-next commits
adding patent coverage beyond single work, but alas. Any in the
pipeline? What are the possible scopes of coverage beyond single work?
I'd guess a list of works, but this would be kind of messy, having to be
specified elsewhere, or all free software. Latter would be unattractive
to many companies, but they already have options.

Mike


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