I understand that there's a ton of legal implications, but hope someone could help with this even with "I am not a lawyer" disclaimer. Would anyone be able to clarify a few points here please?
- If a separate open-source programming language under Apache 2.0 license implements an optional chaining feature, would it be a violation of the patent then?
- What if there's a separate implementation of a Swift compiler developed from scratch independently from Apple, does mean that it's not able to implement optional chaining without licensing the patent?
- Here's the most interesting part: let's say there's a fork of a Swift compiler that significantly diverged and is developed independently from Apple. It seems to me that forks like these still don't violate the patent, otherwise any GitHub fork with unmerged PRs would be a violation. But let's say Google's fork no longer wishes to contribute its changes upstream, at what point does this separate development could trigger a patent violation? Does amount of divergence have any impact, let's say 90% of the codebase changes? Does the name of project matter, if someone names their fork as "Sparrow", not "Swift" is it considered a patent violation at this point if there's no license and royalties paid for optional chaining?