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Comment on Relicensing Dolphin: The long road to GPLv2+parent

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To be fair, most FLOSS license, including GPLv2 and BSD 2-clause and 3-clause, are (were?) usually considered to have an implicit patent grant, similar in spirit to the one in MPLv2 or GPLv3. I don't think that argument that one could use GPLv2 while thinking that software patent are good has that much ground.

On the "thinking that software patents are good" front, I think this bit from the GPLv2 preamble is pretty clear:

Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.
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