Comment by L3viathan
3 years ago
No, pull requests are not illegal, at least when done on Github, because by posting code on Github (that you are allowed to post) you grant Github and its users certain rights:
https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...
> By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and "fork" your repositories (this means that others may make their own copies of Content from your repositories in repositories they control).
That license doesn't allow modifications, which is what pull requests are. The forking thing is only about making copies, not modifications.
Not a lawyer, but it seems like it could be implied-in-fact that you're allowing people to submit pull requests if you publish on GitHub. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied-in-fact_contract
I suppose you can modify the code, but not use it (compile) as such?
Uh, so I just realized how we are discussing how developers submitting pull requests to this project with this license are basically demonstrating publicly performance art style that they've broken copyright law. Or we give the benefit of the doubt and assume they are not testing their changes at all.
Neither copyright law nor the license allow modification, so probably not.
In this specific case you might be correct but in the general case this is not true. The uploader agreeing to something does not affect the rights of other authors than the uploader.