Ask HN: Are GitHub pull-requests governed by the original repository license?
by dmulholl on Hacker News.
This is a question for our legal friends here on HN. Imagine this scenario: I have an open source project on Github with an MIT license. I’ve cargo-culted the Copyright (C) 2022 My Name

line from every MIT-licensed project I’ve ever seen. A random contributor forks my repository and sends me a pull-request. They haven’t altered the license file in any way. So, Question 1: are their contributions automatically licensed under the same MIT license as the original repository? (Note that their fork, which I’m being asked to merge, contains the identical license file.) Question 2: have they (almost certainly inadvertently) assigned copyright over their changes to me? (They’re asking me to merge changes from a repository which contains a copyright declaration in my name.) Question 3: if one, why not the other? Disclaimer — personally I hate even having to think about these kinds of questions, which is why I try to make most of my open-source code available under the Unlicense [1]. I’ve recently discovered the Zero-Clause BSD licence [2] which may be a better alternative as it avoids the potentially problematic concept of a ‘public domain’ — I’d love to hear an informed legal analysis of their differences. [1]: https://unlicense.org [2]: https://ift.tt/5MDtxhO