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The Apache License, v2.0


2. Grant of Copyright License

Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form.


3. Grant of Patent License

Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted. If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including cross-claim or counterclaim in lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within theWork constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.

While the meaning of the Copyright License provision is rather clear, I did not get the meaning of the Patent License provision.

  • Which advantages does the "Grant of Patent License" provision further give to Contributors? Why are they useful?

  • Is the "Grant of Patent License" provision useful only in case of patent litigation?

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Jun 19 '12 at 21:12

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tldrlegal.com/license/APACHE2 - Apache2 summary in plain english. –  Kevin Wang Jul 9 '12 at 12:40
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2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

The license wants avoid this situation:

  • Contributor-A creates a free project.
  • Contributor-A convinces to Contributor-B, Contributor-C and Contributor-D of to collaborate with the project.
  • All people is very happy right now. The world is wonderful.
  • The contributors sell products based on the code of the project.
  • The contributor make much money from the products based on this project.
  • Contributor-A has various patents related to the project and decides to demand to the other contributors.
  • Contributor-A reclaims a fee for each product sold by the other contributors.

Can you see the problem?. Let me give you a real example:











If you want know more info about this case, search the mails related to CARP and patents in the "misc" mailing list of OpenBSD. I think that this case was the first big one case related to this situation (a open protocol with patents).

Probably you can also found information related to SCO lawsuits of the last decade. The clause about patents in the GPLv3 license exists due to the SCO lawsuits.

A lot of projects (and lawyers) have learned very much of the lawsuits of the last decade.

Warning: the license doesn't protect you against lawsuit from companies external to the project.

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I'm not a lawyer, but it looks to me like a plain English reading of section 3 is:

You can freely use the technology in this product, even if any of it is covered by patents owned by the contributors, without having to worry about patent issues. But if you try and sue anyone over patent issues related to this product, then you lose the rights of this patent license and you're not protected anymore, so play nice.

The idea is not "to be useful in patent litigation" so much as "to prevent patent litigation from happening in the first place."

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