Forking a GitHub repo and including code from pull requests within a LGPL license?

Question

There is a project hosted at GitHub which is no longer maintained that I want to use for my project. However it has some bugfixes contained within pull requests from other users, and I would like to include them in the fork and thus my project.

So I was just wondering: under which license do the contributions made as pull requests fall? Is it the same LGPL license as the project, even if the changes haven’t been merged?

Answer 1

Under normal circumstances, it can be assumed that contributions to an open-source project are made available under the same license as the project itself.

In very rare cases, a contributor might explicitly state that the contribution is made under a different license than the one used for the rest of the project. In such cases the copyright situation becomes complex and it might be better to ignore such contributions unless they provide a very large amount of added value to the project.
If you do decide to use such contributions, you should seriously investigate how the licenses interact with each other. You are well advised to consult a lawyer in such cases.