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by johncolanduoni 3550 days ago
Most of the big MIT licensed Microsoft projects I know (.Net Core VM and libraries) are licensed under MIT with a separate, explicit patent grant. For example look at the PATENTS.TXT file in this repo: https://github.com/dotnet/corefx
1 comments
rando832 3550 days ago
Interesting. It's a non-legally binding patent promise. But honestly, I think MS has waded too far into open source to have the bad publicity of breaking that promise, unless MS gets into very bad finances. Anyways, good enough for me.

And it actually makes my point about the MIT license, it's inadequate for patents.

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johncolanduoni 3550 days ago
What makes you think it's not legally binding? As far as I can tell it's as binding as the MIT provisions.
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rando832 3549 days ago
Looks like I was wrong.

According to these links, they will probably work in an actual case. They can be revoked at any time, making them inapplicable to future patent use which was not already going on for some period of time.

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Equitable_defence, http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Patent_promises

Definitely not anywhere near as binding as the MIT license, but it's not a good comparison anyways, MIT addresses only covers only copyright and patent law is a very different and separate area of law.

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