Most of the big MIT licensed Microsoft projects I know (.Net Core VM and libraries) are licensed under MIT with a separate, explicit patent grant. For example look at the PATENTS.TXT file in this repo: https://github.com/dotnet/corefx
Interesting. It's a non-legally binding patent promise. But honestly, I think MS has waded too far into open source to have the bad publicity of breaking that promise, unless MS gets into very bad finances. Anyways, good enough for me.
And it actually makes my point about the MIT license, it's inadequate for patents.
According to these links, they will probably work in an actual case. They can be revoked at any time, making them inapplicable to future patent use which was not already going on for some period of time.
Definitely not anywhere near as binding as the MIT license, but it's not a good comparison anyways, MIT addresses only covers only copyright and patent law is a very different and separate area of law.
