At that time the only argument you were able to produce was that, if Apple decided to go belligerent on whatever patented tech they collaborated to Clang/LLVM, we would have to go to a previous, pre-Apple, version and fork it from that. That would be a version from a good couple years back.
Being able to fork is the ultimate defense to certain corporate evils, but a license that doesn't provide some protection against patents, obviously, won't protect you against that specific evil.
BTW, I use GCC most of the time. And I am shielded from any patented technology Apple may have contributed to it since the NeXT days by the redistribution clause of the GPL.
Apple can only confer redistribution rights for patents they own. If they - or any other gcc contributor for that matter - mistakenly or deliberately reproduced an invention patented by someone else (IBM, Microsoft, Intel...) and contributed it to gcc, then the clause you mention affords you no protection whatsoever.
What part of Apple becoming belligerent on patents they own didn't you get? Obviously no FLOSS license will protect you from patents the contributor doesn't own.
In you example, if IBM, Microsoft or Intel contributed their own patented tech to GCC, they wouldn't be able to sue any user of the GPL'ed code.
My doubts are about BSD-ish licenses - if contributing your patented tech to a BSD project doesn't put you in position to sue downstream users that didn't receive the right to use it directly from you.
Companies come and go. If one company that contributes its own patented tech to a project like LLVM gets acquired by a troll, what protection users would have?
I see no reason to trust a company to behave responsibly towards a community if and when it no longer needs it.
Your insistence in stating the obvious - that nothing protects users from third-party patents - while refusing to acknowledge the question of how much BSD-like licenses protect users from patents owned by those who contribute code to BSD-licensed projects is disturbing.
It's not that I don't acknowledge that your emperor is wearing pasties, I just don't think they cover enough to be considered clothing.
I think the onus is on you, as the advocate of this clause, to name one actual patent troll case that would have been prevented by it. SCO wouldn't have been prevented. The recent Oracle action against Google would not have been prevented. So which one?
You need to provide protection from actual, plausible danger to justify the doubt, uncertainty, and fear that you are keen to spread.
Being able to fork is the ultimate defense to certain corporate evils, but a license that doesn't provide some protection against patents, obviously, won't protect you against that specific evil.
BTW, I use GCC most of the time. And I am shielded from any patented technology Apple may have contributed to it since the NeXT days by the redistribution clause of the GPL.