Apache 2.0 grants patent rights that MIT never mentions

The workload

Choosing between permissive licenses is usually treated as interchangeable, but verified, the Apache License 2.0 text contains a clause the MIT license, already documented in this batch, does not: an express patent grant. The workload this creates is not new engineering, it is a different question to ask when picking a dependency: does this codebase carry patents the founder would want covered, and does the license actually say so, or is patent exposure left to silence, as it is under MIT.

What the documents show

Verified: section 3, 'Grant of Patent License,' states that 'each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work,' limited to claims 'necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work.' The same section states the trigger for losing it: litigation 'alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement' terminates 'any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work...as of the date such litigation is filed.' Verified: the Apache Software Foundation's own license FAQ narrows the scope further, stating that the only claims licensed are 'those you own or have the right to license that read on your contribution,' not every patent a contributor might hold. MIT contains no equivalent clause in either direction: no grant, and so no termination risk, because there is nothing to terminate.

The operating cost

The clause carries no fee; the license is royalty-free by its own terms. Its cost is contingent and structural rather than periodic: a company that uses Apache-2.0-licensed code and later sues a contributor over a patent claim touching that code loses its own patent license to that codebase, an outcome the text states plainly but does not quantify in dollars, since the value of a lost patent license depends on facts the license does not supply.

The stop condition

Per the text, the patent grant is otherwise perpetual and does not expire on its own; it ends only on the litigation trigger the section names, or if the underlying contribution is removed from the codebase entirely. The clause's scope in any real dispute, meaning which claims 'read on' a given contribution, is a legal question the license text alone does not resolve, and this entry does not attempt to resolve it either.

• Does the dependency under evaluation carry patents the business would want an express grant to cover?
• Is the current license MIT, Apache 2.0, or something else, and does that difference matter for this specific codebase?
• Would filing a patent claim against a contributor to this codebase cost the business its own license to use it?

A patent grant is not a guarantee against infringement claims from outsiders; it is a specific, mutual arrangement among the licensor and licensee. Reading section 3 tells a founder what that arrangement actually is, rather than what 'permissive' is assumed to include.