Acceptable patent license for free software?

[simo]

On Thu, 2008-04-03 at 15:44 +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> Hi!  I'm writing guidelines for IETF document authors on how to achieve
> free software compatible copyright and patent licenses [1].  The
> copyright area is rather well understood, I think; pick any liberal
> license that is compatible with all (reasonable) free software licenses
> and you are done.
> 
> However, the patent license area seems less clear to me.
> 
> Does anyone have some references to any patent license that have been
> deemed acceptable to some free software projects?

The GPLv3 now embeds a patent license grant so that's one.
IIRC Apache and Eclipse license also have patent provisions.

This is the RedHat promise on software patents:
http://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html

Not sure you can call it a license technically, but it is what Red Hat
uses to let free software projects  use his patents.


Simo.