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=tesnyqlybsgndyb95lh2zvugxovhu...@mail.gmail.com/
- NRK
--
Gimmi
