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. 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. [0]: https://www.gentoo.org/glep/glep-0076.html#certificate-of-origin [1]: https://lwn.net/ml/gcc/CAGWvnyme6cQUGb+G4=tesnyqlybsgndyb95lh2zvugxovhu...@mail.gmail.com/ - NRK
