I'm sure many of you got invited to this private beta because you had previously supported the Software Licensing SE on Area51, so I feel like this will be a useful question.
Software patents and software licensing are at least related.
So, are software licensing questions on-topic on this site?
Questions specific to software licensing should be off topic.
The patent process (and the experts we are working with in that field) is entirely different than the issue of licensing. It's a different audience, so I would say it is off topic for this particular project.
Some software licenses (e.g the Apache 2.0 / GPL 3) do contain very specific clauses regarding patents. One can terminate the license agreement if patent litigation is initiated, the other stipulates that recipients of a covered work must also receive an irrevocable royalty free license to use, modify or distribute work covered by a patent. While I agree that questions purely about software licensing should be off topic here, there are some areas where the two mix.
Redhat in fact made history with a deal that allowed them to distribute JBoss under the terms of the GPL3.
I do agree with Robert, but would hope that we take care to make sure we're not in one of those overlapping areas before casting close votes.
Because of the relationship between open source licenses and software patents, it is natural that people interested in these areas would come here. Questions about licenses and their use should be off-topic. But an answer could be more helpful if the questioner was directed toward resources where they might be able to find the information they are looking for such as groklaw.net, opensource.org, fsf.org, or softwarefreedom.org, to name four prominent sites when open source is frequently or exclusively discussed.
