[License-discuss] Contributor Clauses in Licenses

[Josh Berkus]

On 12/8/25 3:43 PM, Pamela Chestek wrote:
> As to Josh's comment "No text contained within the license can enforce 
> that my PR is under that license," I disagree. When I created my 
> contribution I necessarily accepted the terms of the outbound license, 
> or at least I am hard-pressed to think of a way that someone made a 
> contribution that matters but would not have taken an action that 
> requires acceptance of the license.

I can think of lots of ways to make a meaningful contribution without 
having either run or redistributed the software:

- Someone contributing grammar corrections to the docs or website 
without using the software

- Someone offering to naturalize the documentation based on a 
translation framework, which also doesn't require using the software

- Someone building a code contribution based on a differently licensed 
version of the same software (if, for example, it's available under a 
proprietary license as well)

- Someone submitting 3rd-party dependency version updates without 
running the software (like, for example, DependaBot does, and humans do 
this as well).

- A graphics designer submitting a change to graphics or UI design 
created entirely with design programs.

I'm sure there's other situations I haven't thought of.  Are most 
contributions based on the contributor having first downloaded and run 
the software under the license?  Sure.  But definitely not all of them.

-- 
Josh Berkus