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Interestingly, Facebook did remove its PATENTS clause on another project they have recently - zstd - https://github.com/facebook/zstd/pull/801
I expect they did a thorough analysis to work out if any of it was either already patented, or patentable. That doesn't mean they don't have patents though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think DannyBee is simply wrong that the explicit grant extinguishes the implicit one, and I've seen plenty of real lawyers agree. The copyright license and the patent license (LICENSE and PATENTS respectively) are separate contracts and even address separate areas of law. The legal principle involved here is that the permissions granted under LICENSE may not be unilaterally withdrawn except for reasons specified in…
> The PATENTS file can not modify or nullify anything except itself, either by its existence or by its subsequent revocation. No court would say that it does, because the implications for contract law in general go far beyond patent and copyright. The law is more about precedent than logic. Unless you can point to specific opinions from lawyers or judges on this, this sounds more like your opinion than any kind of pr…
It provides weak support for your position, because most of the cases it cites are for things that clearly follow different rules and precedents than patents do. Pretty sloppy for an "actual US Patent lawyer" if you ask me. More importantly, "broader in scope" does not imply "exclusive of". The implicit license might indeed be broader and there's still no whiff of either extinguishing the other. As I've said repeatedly, when contracts (of which licenses are a subset) are written to supersede something else, they say so. There's no implicit nullification.