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I'm struggling to understand this as well - I would have thought OSS licensing and software patents would be incompatible.

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Sadly they are not.

This is why the W3C has a patent policy [1] to prevent contributed software and specifications from being covered by patents.

[1]: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20040205/

If this still does not make any sense, realize that patents and copyrights, while both forms of IP, are completely different, legally. Also recall how open source GIF implementations were still covered by the Unisys patent.

Which is the sort of thing that did the other JEDEC members a fat lot of good when Rambus (spit) went on the warpath: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambus#Lawsuits

I believe that was the purpose of the GPL3. You know, the one that nobody uses because it is too draconian.

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