contributions without copyright assignment

contributions without copyright assignment

Posted Mar 22, 2013 22:06 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
In reply to: A bit of a mountain out of a molehill, I think. by tzafrir
Parent article: When does the FSF own your code?

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.

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