But if somebody posts code on a website where most of the public content is under free licenses and the TOS explicitly dictates that you grant certain licenses to other users for free, I think we can all have a reasonable expectation that the code in question will also be under a free license. And if the expectation is broken without a clear indicator, that's a recipe for confusion.
Is it? I've read reports that all but a fraction of Github repos are single-commiter code dumps.
> the TOS explicitly dictates that you grant certain licenses to other users for free
Where?
https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/
The only stipulation I see is:
> By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and fork your repositories.
Unfortunately, the TOS doesn't provide a clear legal definition of fork. Does it go beyond clicking the fork button and copying the repo across Github servers? Does it including cloning the repo to a local disk? Or running the code? Or maintaining a derivative project?