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He missed this one, which may also be problematic:

> You may not convey a covered work if you are a party to an arrangement with a third party that is in the business of distributing software, under which you make payment to the third party based on the extent of your activity of conveying the work, and under which the third party grants, to any of the parties who would receive the covered work from you, a discriminatory patent license.

This was intended to avoid situations similar to the Microsoft/Novell patent grant agreement, but could have quite broad scope.



It sounds more like they won't sign any non-exclusive patent agreements, like an IP monopsony.


As far as I can see, the main case this covers is, for instance, say Apple adopts GPLv3 Bash. IBM decided to sue over their patent on causing the letter 'w' to be displayed on a computer screen (or whatever). Currently, Apple can do three things; fight it, settle, or stop using bash (the last is impractical, of course). This clause of GPLv3 almost removes the settlement option; IBM would be highly unlikely to license the patent to, not only Apple, but anyone redistributing the redistributable source from MacOS.

For a slightly more realistic example (most of the GPL stuff Apple uses, except for GCC, is not really all that vulnerable to patents), take the bluez Bluetooth stack, used by Android. There's a very real risk that one of the many holders of Bluetooth related patents may assert one against Google or against an OEM over bluez, and in that case, if the patent was valid, licensing it would be the obvious solution. This would work, because bluez is GPLv2; it wouldn't necessarily work if it were GPLv3.

I can see what the FSF was going for with this clause, but it does make it substantially riskier for companies to depend upon GPL(v3) components.


it does make it substantially riskier for companies to depend upon GPL(v3) components.

I think we can call GPLv3 a success, then!




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