ECL 2.0 and New Questions!

[Matthew Flaschen]

Chris Travers wrote:
> I.e. if that company licensed the software to me under the MIT license
> and then tried to sue me for infringing on their rights through the
> use of the software, I would think that it would be fairly
> straight-forward to suggest that the MIT license gave me patent as
> well as copyright licenses (I believe you can't give me permission to
> do something and then later sue me for doing it).

You can always try to use the implicit license argument (note that MIT
is more than just implicit, since the word "use" has special
significance), but it's inherently risky.

> So, if I understand you correctly, you are suggesting that the ECL
> could be reasonably interpreted by a court to allow someone to
> retroactively negotiate additional patent licenses for a fee.  If so,
> wouldn't the MS-RL and the GPL v3 suffer from a similar problem?

When would you need an additional patent license on top of GPLv3?

Matt Flaschen