[hackernews]

From the post:

"The Beta release is comprised of 54 webOS components available as opensource. This brings over 450,000 lines of code released under the Apache 2.0 license, which is one of the most liberal and accepted in the open source community."

[Danieru]

That is good news, Apache 2.0 does in fact have a patent grant. It also happens to be Goolge's favourite license.

[azakai]

The patent grant is only for those using the code. So it wouldn't help Google unless Google rebuilt Android on WebOS.

[rbanffy]

How much code is enough to be covered?

[azakai]

IANAL, but (1) I would assume that cynically including some unneeded code would not suddenly grant protection for all the rest of your code, and (2) the protection applies to the part of the program actually using the Apache licensed code that was adopted, so it would need to be an integral part of the relevant component. For example if there is a patent on a video codec, the code would need to be in the video codec handling code.

And again, IANAL, but I assume the implication is that you can't just grab some code and stick it alongside your app for protection. You are only protected if you actually used the license-giving code in your app in the intended way. So this would not help Android, which does not build upon WebOS.

[stinkytaco]

That would be... awesome.