Fedora Board Recap 07-06-2011

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2011-07-06 at 16:48 -0400, Richard Fontana wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 07, 2011 at 12:49:11AM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > On 07/06/2011 11:52 PM, Jon Stanley wrote:
> > > *** In the US, at least, there's only minimal rights associated with
> > > things that have no license, therefore, we would be on shakey legal
> > > grounds if we accepted contributions without license terms
> > 
> > Yet this routinely happens.  Patches contributed via bugzilla or ones
> > that contributors pick from mailing lists etc. 
> 
> I think there may be some confusion on this one particular
> point. Something can be licensed even if it doesn't have an explicit
> license notice on it. Implicit licensing is pervasive in free software
> development.

Is there some kind of solid legal basis for this opinion? It seems
speculative. Has it been established definitively that, say, a patch
sent to the mailing list of a well-established F/OSS project definitely
has an implicit license? I think a lot of us operate under that
assumption (though we probably don't think about it too much), but it
strikes me as the kind of thing a court might have different thoughts
about.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net