On Tue, 29 Sep 2020 09:54:43 +0100 Daniel Littlewood <danielittlew...@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Daniel, > Hi all, apologies if this is the wrong mailing list (I couldn't tell > exactly where to send it). > > Could someone please confirm for me what the licensing status of > patches hosted on the suckless domain is? I assume that they are > meant to inherit the MIT/X license from their parent projects, but I > can't see anywhere this is explicitly stated. I don't think that they > inherit the license of the parent project by default. patches are usually just added as-is and don't bear a license, which practically says "all rights reserved". This, though, doesn't matter if you just use them for your personal needs. If you plan to work on a patch or republish it or something and want to go 1000% sure, it's best to e-mail the original author of the patch and ask him if he agrees to license it under the ISC license (which is equivalent to the MIT/X license, but stripped of useless legal clauses) or the GPL, whichever you prefer. If he agrees, you can modify and republish the patch, as long as you give proper attribution. What should be said, though, is that I don't see a big problem with patch licensing anyway. Neither would anybody go to court over a 10 line diff, nor would any company respect any license or give attribution, so let's just accept that and carry on. With best regards Laslo