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GPLv3 provides for two classes of patent commitments:

    Prohibition of Enforcement of patent claims against those to whom you

    distribute: GPLv3 \S10 makes explicit that demands for acceptance of

    patent licenses or payment of patent royalties by those to whom a

    licensee directly distributes are additional conditions that may not

    imposed. This provision establishes a uniform rule of patent exhaustion

    with respect to GPL’d programs regardless of the domestic patent law in

    any particular system or locale.

    Grant of license to claims in contributor versions: Section 11 introduces

    an affirmative grant of rights to patent claims by those who contribute

    code to GPL’d programs. The intent is to prevent parties within the

    commons from aggressively asserting patents against users of code they

    have themselves modified, preventing a form of commons betrayal by

    ``insiders'' to the community. A contributor’s patent claims necessarily

    infringed by the version of the program created by the incorporation of

    its modifications are licensed to all subsequent users and modifiers of

    the program, or programs based on the program. No patent claims only

    infringed by subsequent modifications by other parties are thus

    licensed. Patent claims acquired after the making of the ``contributor

    version'' necessarily infringed by that version are also licensed by this

    provision at the time of their acquisition or perfection. When a company

    with a large number of such claims acquires the program’s modifier, all

    claims held or thereafter acquired by the purchaser are automatically

    licensed under this provision. The acquisition of Nokia by Microsoft, for

    example, resulted in the automatic licensing of all Microsoft claims now

    or hereafter acquired which read on any contributor version of any GPLv3

    program ever modified by Nokia. The wholesale decimation of Microsoft

    patent claims on GPLv3 programs arising from the purchase of Nokia has so

    far been unremarked in the industry.

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