Questions wrt license application through pull requests

[tobie]

Thank you so much for providing this information to the public. It's great to have a better understanding of how lawyers reason about these issues.

I'm always interested by anything that can help make the contribution flow more seamless while maintaining sufficient protection of the project and its users. In this regard, the "pull request hack" that you describe in authorship.md is particularly intriguing. I have a couple of suggestions and questions about it.

In authorship.md it states that:

The first convention to note is the technical nature of “pull request”
contributions to open source projects. When a GitHub member contributes a patch
to someone else’s project on GitHub, they generally do so in the form of a pull
request. The pull request entails copying the entire project and republishing
it, together with the contributor’s modifications, as a new version. Therefore,
as part of submitting that patch, the user has formally applied whatever license
documentation had been included in the project to the contents of the patch.

1. Depending on the user's permission level on the project, a pull request can happen either on the user's own fork of the project or on the project itself. I assume that this doesn't change much from a legal perspective—the user has formally applied the license to their patch in both cases—but it would be nice to clarify whether both of these options are covered.

2. Typically, once the pull request is merged, the user deletes their branch. The option to do so is part of the UI on GitHub and presented as the standard follow-up step. In doing so, doesn't the user destroy evidence of having applied the licence to their patch, and isn't that a problem?

I understand that you cannot provide legal advice here, but I think that addressing these two issues in the document itself would be helpful to readers beyond myself.

Thank you.