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1Patent issues for FOSS developers are discussed in detail in § 4 of this document.
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2FOSS licenses differ explicitly or customarily in how they define the scope of derivative works. For example, GPL licensors usually have an expansive view of what a derivative work is, or assume that the underlying copyright system supplies the appropriate expansive definition. By contrast, the Apache License version 2.0 provides an explicit definition of “derivative work” that is narrower than the definition understood by the typical GPL licensor.
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3Often, instead of writing a new license from scratch, an existing license with various exceptions can be used. This structure is widely accepted and much clearer than drafting a new license from scratch.
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4Moreover, most GPLv2-licensed works are licensed under GPLv2 “or any later version”, or else do not specify a version number; this is understood at least to modify the copyleft requirement so as to permit modified versions to be distributed under GPLv3 rather than GPLv2.
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5Other common names include “MIT-style”, “two-clause BSD” and “modified BSD” licenses. The word “modified” refers historically to the revision of a more restrictive earlier version of the BSD license. The term “MIT-style” is arguably misleading, since MIT as an institution has used many licenses for its software, including very permissive licenses as well as proprietary ones.
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6The AGPL is meant to be the successor to the Affero GPL, version 1, a variant of GPLv2 published by Affero, Inc. in 2002.
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7Most modern web applications include many components, including REST or CGI components (which are server-side operations) and client-side operations (via Javascript running in the browser). The latter involves distribution of software in the strict sense. The former is the issue we are focused on here. There may also be circumstances in which distribution of client-side code has copyleft implications for server-side code.
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8However, you shouldn’t feel ashamed of asking for a financial component to the settlement, especially if you plan to funnel those funds back into the project. The important thing is to make compliance with the license the primary concern and financial redress as only a secondary concern.
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1Our description of patents as “property” should not be read as legitimization of any particular aspect of patent law. Rather, we are simply observing that patents, as recognized by the applicable legal system, possess characteristics associated generally with forms of personal property. For example, like other forms of personal property, patents can be bought and sold and give the owner the power to exclude others from enjoying or exploiting the legal interest inherent in them.
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2For simplicity, and following usual legal practice, we use “invention” to mean a purported invention claimed in a patent.
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3In this document we avoid use of the term “software patent,” which has no generally agreed-upon definition. Under current U.S. law, software per se is (probably) not patentable, but it is generally a simple exercise in artful legal drafting to represent a software-related invention as a claim covering patentable subject matter (generally by reciting generic, well-known hardware features). Although the details differ, the basic situation is much the same in many other countries, despite a widely-held misconception in the FOSS community that the patentability of software-related inventions is peculiar to U.S. law.
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4Patent examiners are the officials charged with determining whether to issue an applied-for patent.
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5FOSS developers should not get the impression from our use of the pronoun “you” that they are particularly at risk of being sued for patent infringement; as noted above, suits against such developers are unlikely.
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6Some FOSS developers have assumed that patent law distinguishes between source code and object code, and that liability for patent infringement can be avoided by distributing source code only, but U.S. patent law provides no clear basis for this assumption. Distribution of source code might well give rise to liability for contributory patent infringement, at least, and many claims in issued patents would be literally infringed by the distribution of source code. The First Amendment may place limits on the policing of source code publication by the courts, but this issue has not yet been addressed by the courts in a patent infringement context.
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7550 U.S.    , 127 S. Ct. 1727 (2007).
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1“Consumer confusion” is an important test regarding trademark similarity used by the USPTO.
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2It turns out that classic FOSS “hacker wordplay” names like “GNU” are actually an excellent way to avoid possible trademark infringement claims. Since “GNU” itself does not resemble the word “Unix” at all, and since when expanded it explicitly tells the reader that the product is not Unix (i.e., “Gnu’s Not Unix”), a potential trademark holder on the term “Unix” would be hard pressed to make the case that consumers would be confused and think that GNU really is Unix.
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