License on userscripts?

[maxf130]

Qutebrowser includes a number of userscripts in misc/userscripts. Some of these have an explicit copyright notice declaring them to be part of qutebrowser and to be distributed under the terms of the GPLv3. Others do not.

Can we assume, for the purposes of packaging, that all the userscripts are licensend under the GPLv3?

See the commentary in this pull request for context.

[jgkamat]

Maximilian Friedersdorff writes:

Can we assume, for the purposes of packaging, that all the userscripts are licensend under the GPLv3?

Normally, when people contribute to a repository, it's convention to assume that the contribution is the same license as the source repository (unless otherwise noted). Otherwise, every repository without license headers in individual files would quickly become a mess. I would think that it's safe to assume everything in there is GPLv3, as no one said otherwise in their contributions to my knowledge. I don't think the header actually says much either way (for example, if I fix a bug in a script somoene else originally contributed, I could add a header adding copyright/license for my changes, while the original work's license is is still unknown. If we were to be conservative though, we could apply the '15 Line Limit for small contributions' that the FSF uses (I think the rationale being that diffs that small cannot be meaningfully copyrighted) and contact the authors that have over that much to be sure (to be clear, I don't think that's necessary): https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Copyright-Assignment.html