Title: This is a question for our legal friends here on HN. Imagine this scenario: I have an open source project on Github with an MIT license. I&#x27;ve cargo-culted the<p><pre><code>   Copyright (C) 2022 My Name
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line from every MIT-licensed project I&#x27;ve ever seen.<p>A random contributor forks my repository and sends me a pull-request. They haven&#x27;t altered the license file in any way.<p>So, Question 1: are their contributions automatically licensed under the same MIT license as the original repository? (Note that their fork, which I&#x27;m being asked to merge, contains the identical license file.)<p>Question 2: have they (almost certainly inadvertently) assigned copyright over their changes to me? (They&#x27;re asking me to merge changes from a repository which contains a copyright declaration in my name.)<p>Question 3: if one, why not the other?<p>Disclaimer -- personally I hate even having to think about these kinds of questions, which is why I try to make most of my open-source code available under the Unlicense [1]. I&#x27;ve recently discovered the Zero-Clause BSD licence [2] which may be a better alternative as it avoids the potentially problematic concept of a &#x27;public domain&#x27; -- I&#x27;d love to hear an informed legal analysis of their differences.<p>[1]: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;unlicense.org<p>[2]: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opensource.org&#x2F;licenses&#x2F;0BSD
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