L02-ND: Yes
Rationale
NFD 24.07 and ndn-cxx 0.9.0 publish GPLv3. GPLv3 section 11 expressly grants a non-exclusive worldwide royalty-free patent license for each contributor's essential patent claims to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import, run, modify and propagate that contributor version. Essential claims exclude claims infringed only by further modifications. The official NDN policy explicitly chooses GPLv3 as its core implementation patent-protection strategy.
Assessment method
Express patent-clause and applicability review under the common holder-bounded L02 rule
Source context
Version-pinned project licenses and attributable source notices; documentary review 2026-10-17
Outstanding qualification
NDN consortium membership is not a patent license; institutional claims outside the licensed contributor versions remain outside this finding. Published implementation-bound grant, not a blanket royalty-free promise for arbitrary independent reimplementations. Credit only claims controlled by the declaring contributors within the grant; no third-party, dependency or underlying-layer clearance is inferred. License compliance remains required. No finding that a patent exists, is valid or is infringed, and no legal-enforceability opinion.
Public sources
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/named-data/NFD/NFD-24.07/COPYING.md
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/named-data/ndn-cxx/ndn-cxx-0.9.0/COPYING.md
- https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt
- https://named-data.net/project/ndn-copyright-and-patents/
Editorial evidence references
The following identifiers refer to research records not included in this public package; they are not public links.
- round373-sources.json