An Introduction to Modern Open Source Licence Patent Clauses

I bet that title sent shivers of pure pleasure up and down your spine, didn’t it? :-) This post explains why all modern open source licences have patent clauses, what they do (and don’t do), and why you should use and recommend licences which contain them. This question is relevant to discussions of licence choice.

I am not a lawyer, although I do sometimes play one in real life. If in doubt, consult the real deal.

This analysis will focus on the 3 most popular modern licences with patent clauses – the Apache License 2.0 (“APL”), the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (“MPL”), and the GNU General Public License 3.0 (“GPL”).

What Do They Do?

The APL (section 3) and the MPL (section 2.1, 1.11, 1.2, 1.3) say that if you make a contribution to the code, you have to grant all users a licence to any patent you hold which is infringed by your contribution, or by the whole thing as a result of adding your contribution. In the case of the GPL (Section 11, para 2), you have to grant a licence to any patent you hold which is infringed by any part of the modified work, at the time you contributed to it, whether you wrote or changed that part or not. So the GPL’s grant is wider in scope than the other two.

The above affects contributors. There are also clauses which relate to users. In the case of the MPL (section 5.2) and the GPL (section 10, para 3), you lose your right to use the software at all if you launch a patent suit against someone else regarding that software. In the case of the APL (section 3), you lose any patent licences you might have got to the code (which may be none), but you don’t lose your copyright rights.

What Don’t They Do?

In the case of the APL and MPL, they don’t make a contributor grant a licence to patents which the code already implemented before they came along, or which someone else made the code implement while they were contributing. In all cases, if the code is changed in the future by someone else to implement a patent, the licences don’t make the contributor grant a licence to that patent. (I.e. if BigCorp has a patent on the Bar algorithm, and they contribute some non-Bar-related code to project Foo, you can’t get a free license to the Bar patent by changing Foo to implement it.) And they don’t protect you at all from the patents of people who are neither contributors nor users, including patent trolls.

Why Are They Good?

  • They provide some protection to stop one member of the community suing another one. This particularly applies to the MPL and GPL, which rescind all rights (including copyright rights) to the code when a suit is filed, thereby giving the small, patentless guy some power when this happens.
  • Relatedly, they make big companies much more comfortable about collaborating on a codebase together. Without a patent licence, the first big company you recruit to work on your code will scare off any additional ones, because they are concerned about the first company’s patents.
  • If your code is widely-enough used, it provides some protection from third parties who would not want to lose their rights to use it.

Patent clauses do not solve the software patent problem. But they do mitigate it and, in the presence of the problem, they do help build collaborating communities. That is why all modern open source licences have a patent clause, and why you should only use and promote licences which have them, and encourage others to do the same.