[richardfontana]

Regarding the MIT license, I know one lawyer who disagrees in practice but I'm not sure if that lawyer seriously believes it. That lawyer is associated with an effort by some companies that have traditionally used standards-setting activity as a patent license revenue generating activity, to argue that open source licenses can legitimately preclude any grant of patent license, explicitly or implicitly (that is, that an open source license can be a pure copyright license). Part of that effort is an attempt to argue, based for example on historical evidence or on a policy basis, that certain widely-used open source licenses, like the MIT license, are susceptible to the "copyright only" interpretation.

My co-worker Scott Peterson has given a lot of thought to the issue of the MIT license as explicitly embodying a patent license grant; I am hoping he will publish an article on this in the near future.

[DannyBee]

I really hope Scott posts his research. I know he's given this a lot of thought and looked through a lot of precedent on this issue.

Honestly, he was the one who convinced me that there really is nothing out there to hang your hat on when it comes to suing people for patent infringement in MIT licensed software.