Hello,
On 02/03/2026 10:46, NRK wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 28, 2026 at 02:28:18PM +0000, Gimmi wrote:
>> Is there some kind of implied licenses for the patches once they are
>> uploaded?
>
> Some of the other replies already give answers which align with my
> understanding of the copyright law as well, so I won't repeat those
> points. However, I think this discussion as a whole is heading in a
> unproductive theorycelery direction so I'll try and give some practical
> perspective here.
>
> In order to avoid ambiguity with copyright/license, larger open source
> projects such as the linux kernel require you to sign off your commit
> agreeing with it's "Developer's Certificate of Origin":
>
> https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/submitting-patches.html#developer-s-certificate-of-origin-1-1
>
> It's pretty short with only 4 points, so I suggest reading it, but the
> tldr is that by signing off your commit you're explicitly stating that
> the commit will follow the license of whatever file it modified (if you
> wanted to submit under a different (but still compatible) license then
> you'd need to create a new file with that license header).
>
> Many other large projects follow a similar rule as well, e.g Gentoo
> linux [0], GCC [1] and probably many others. (Note that this is
> different than requiring contributor to transfer/assign the copyright to
> upstream author, which is what GCC used to require before [1]).
>
> So what about smaller projects that don't have such rule (i.e ~99% of
> open-source)? Maybe there's some legal ground for someone to submit
> change and then later randomly decide that it has a different license
> than the original work. But practically, open-source development is
> built upon trust so we expect contributors who spent their free time
> submitting patches not to do that.
Suckless works differently: instead of submitting a change to be
incorporated in upstream, you publish a patch that _the user_
incorporates in their software. Practically speaking, this means that a
patch is not a commit in the repository of the software, but on the
wiki. At most we could assume it has the same license as the wiki pages;
however, I could not find the license of the wiki (maybe I didn't look
hard enough).
And this is by assuming an implicit release under the same license of
the repository, which, based also on the overall discussion, is not true
under current copyright law.
>
> So unless a patch explicitly states that it has a different license, we
> should expect that it follows the same license as the file that it's
> modifying. And so unless you live in Germany (this is a joke), I don't
> think you're ever going to go to jail for ricing your dwm setup.
Ricing your own? Probably not. Sharing it? The risk is greater IMO.
>
> [0]: https://www.gentoo.org/glep/glep-0076.html#certificate-of-origin
> [1]: https://lwn.net/ml/gcc/CAGWvnyme6cQUGb+G4=tesNYqLYBSGnDYb95LH2zVUgxovHU7kw_AT_mail.gmail.com/
>
> - NRK
>
--
Gimmi
Received on Mon Mar 02 2026 - 21:07:32 CET