Im learning about the Eclipse Public License. According to Wikipedia, it requires that anyone distributing the work grant every recipient a license to any patents that they might hold that cover the modifications they have made. I dont understand what license to any patents mean. Is it talking about how in viral licensing schemes there may be a restriction on what kind of licenses derivative works can have, and its explicitly saying that there is no such requirement in the Eclipse Public License?Also this states EPL grants patent rights from all contributors to use and make available the code. I thought code can only be copyrighted, not patented?
What does it mean to license a patent to software?
terminology;patents;epl