I'm not a lawyer, but from my understanding the implicit patents grant functions well only in the US as a product of US patent law, but is absent from the world's other patent systems. In some countries it is even disallowed.
During the analysis of the Oracle-Sun merger, a lawyer from the European Commission said that the implicit patent grant from MySQL may be limited to the purpose of the original software and would not extend to forks: http://ec.europa.eu/competition/mergers/cases/decisions/m552...
Another problem with the implicit patent grant in GPL v.2 is that it was never tested in court. This is not enough reason to doubt it, but considering how the SCO lawsuit took 10 years to get solved and how many resources were invested by Novell and IBM to get to that point for basically a clear-cut decision (not only infringement was absent, but SCO didn't even own the copyrights they claimed infringed), would you really tell Oracle to fuck off in case of a threat?
Also consider how patent lawsuits have gone international. Witness how Samsung and Apple are attacking each other in non-US countries. A license that's only reliable in the US is not enough anymore. And you don't even know if GPL v.2 is reliable in the US. Not until it is tested, not until there's a precedent.
And yet another problem: Oracle owns everything Java, so they aren't really bound by the GPL.
During the analysis of the Oracle-Sun merger, a lawyer from the European Commission said that the implicit patent grant from MySQL may be limited to the purpose of the original software and would not extend to forks: http://ec.europa.eu/competition/mergers/cases/decisions/m552...
Another problem with the implicit patent grant in GPL v.2 is that it was never tested in court. This is not enough reason to doubt it, but considering how the SCO lawsuit took 10 years to get solved and how many resources were invested by Novell and IBM to get to that point for basically a clear-cut decision (not only infringement was absent, but SCO didn't even own the copyrights they claimed infringed), would you really tell Oracle to fuck off in case of a threat?
Also consider how patent lawsuits have gone international. Witness how Samsung and Apple are attacking each other in non-US countries. A license that's only reliable in the US is not enough anymore. And you don't even know if GPL v.2 is reliable in the US. Not until it is tested, not until there's a precedent.
And yet another problem: Oracle owns everything Java, so they aren't really bound by the GPL.