From the course: Programming Foundations: Open-Source Licensing

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The role of patent licenses and promises

The role of patent licenses and promises

From the course: Programming Foundations: Open-Source Licensing

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The role of patent licenses and promises

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- [Voiceover] A patent grant is an expressed grant of all rights incident to a patent which are to make, use, and sell an invention. There's another concept known as a Patent Promise. It's important to note that a promise itself does not make a contract, rather, there needs to be a bargain for exchange supported by some consideration. In the absence of a contract, a promise can be revoked at any time. An example of a Patent Promise can be found on Red Hat site. The reason why a Patent Promise is necessary with Red Hat Linux is because the underlying source code is licensed under the GPL Version 1 license which never addressed patent issues. Another example of a Patent Promise can be found in the GitHub repository for the dotnet course CLR project. In that repository, there are two files: LICENSE.TXT and PATENTS.TXT. LICENSE.TXT contains the text of the MIT license. PATENTS.TXT contains a rather lengthy description of a Patent Promise. The Microsoft Core CLR project represents a…

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