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Yes there is such magic wording. You can't use the software without agreeing to the license. It is obviously the case that anyone who contributes is a user of t
by velcrovan 8y ago
Yes there is such magic wording. You can't use the software without agreeing to the license. It is obviously the case that anyone who contributes is a user of the software. Thus all contributors are bound by the license terms whether or not their names are added to any list. If any contributor were to assert a violation of their copyright, they would themselves be in violation of the license.
- foldr 8y agoYeah, but you don't know that the person who contributed the code actually holds the copyright to it unless you keep proper records. It's also unclear whether people do in fact automatically agree to all the terms of a license merely by, say, submitting a pull request. Even if the license asserts that this is the case, not all terms of a license are necessarily legally meaningful or enforceable in any given jurisdiction. There isn't a huge amount of case law on this kind of thing, as far as I'm aware. The bottom line is that any kind of open source license has copyright as its foundation. If you don't have a proper record of the copyright holders, then the license doesn't mean much. You need to know exactly who has the copyright to the code and exactly who is agreeing to release the code under a given license.