[OT] Microsoft filled patent applications for scoped and immutable types

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 5 September 2014 at 09:26:22 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> Indeed, what if MS buys FSF and releases GPL4? Everyone will be 
> screwed.

It has to be in the spirit of GPL according to clause 9, so GPL4 
has to be aligned with the current FSF philosophies...

> Well, this is what the author does: grants the right to 
> relicense to everybody. It's granted outside GPL, so one can't 
> refer to GPL being hard to understand.

Not sure what you meant with this. GPL grants the legal recipient 
of the object the right to obtain the source code and create 
copies of it under the same terms. But you cannot claim the right 
to the source without having obtained the object in a legal 
manner first and you cannot demand that others give you a copy. 
(Matters little for wide distributions… but a group of people 
could in theory cross license programs under GPL and have a 
mutual non-distribution agreement that if broken would cause full 
distribution of all the programs.)

So anyone sitting on a GPL2 licensed object with a valid upgrade 
clause can release it as GPL3? And you can relicense a derived 
work built on top of GPL2 as GPL2+another license that does not 
contradict the rights granted by GPL2?