[License-review] For Approval: OpenMDW License Agreement, versions 1.1 (OpenMDW-1.1)

[McCoy Smith]

On 8/15/2026 6:01 PM, Richard Fontana via License-review wrote:
> The matter is discussed at some length in the Third Discussion Draft
> Rationale (March 2027)
> (https://gplv3.fsf.org/gpl3-dd3-rationale.pdf/download). I'll quote
> the passage (and apologies for the seemingly off-topic discussion, but
> I actually think it is relevant in relation to the issue of historical
> precedent for patent assertions leading to termination of copyright as
> well as patent licenses):
>
> <begin>
> <snip>
> In Draft 3 the termination provision of section 8 has been revised to
> indicate that, if a licensee violates the GPL, a contributor may
> terminate any patent licenses that it granted under the first
> paragraph of section 11 to that licensee, in addition to any copyright
> permissions the contributor granted to the licensee. Therefore, a
> contributor may terminate the patent licenses it granted to a
> downstream licensee who brings patent infringement litigation in
> violation of section 10. The changes we have made to sections 8, 10
> and 11, taken as a whole, eliminate the special need for the narrow
> patent retaliation provision of section 2, which we have removed in
> Draft 3.
> <end>
>
> The penultimate sentence there interestingly does not quite say
> explicitly that the relevant patent assertion scenario can lead to
> termination of copyright as well as patent licenses, but it seems to
> me that there's no other way to interpret that paragraph, or indeed
> the relevant text of GPLv3.

I think maybe you mean the third-to-last quoted sentence, but yes this 
seems to make clear that the GPLv3 author can terminate patent *&* 
copyright rights upon a patent assertion. That had been my recollection 
from the drafting days, but I sort of feel like the text describing that 
right wound up being sub-optimal (IMHO) in expressing that right. Thanks 
for digging into the history!

So at least MPLv2 & GPLv3 (and maybe GPLv2?) give a (C) termination 
right upon patent assertions. CDDLv1.1 does as well (see Sec 6.2). So, 
at a minimum, I think we can conclude that a patent defensive 
termination clause that allows for termination of copyright rights isn't 
anomalous.

McCoy