A bit of a mountain out of a molehill, I think.

Posted Mar 19, 2013 21:35 UTC (Tue) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]

True, but it is emacs, and that project requires a copyright assignment. If the author can withdraw that assignment, the project (and everyone else) would still have the right to use the code under the relevant Free software licence, but this project would have to reject it, or waive it's own rules on requiring assignment, so in this case it makes a difference to the project.

Posted Mar 22, 2013 22:06 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

A contributor commits code to one of the version-control repositories of those projects. As soon as this was done, the code is already published. He can't (legally) retract the code that was published (Right? AINAL). You don't need any extra permission from the author to use that code.

I've always wondered about that.

I don't think "published" affects anything at all except for when the clock starts for copyright expiration.

I like to think that when someone sends a patch to a project mailing list and says, "here's a patch," but does not mention copyright at all, that there is some kind of copyright assignment or license implied, but I wonder just what, and a part of me says that under those circumstances, the project has no rights at all.

I've heard of companies that immediately delete patches sent to them for their non-open-source products for fear of violating copyright by even accidentally using them.