[__MatrixMan__]

What does that rejection look like? Do they refuse to merge the PR until you send them a document or something?

As far as I'm aware these legal dark corners are uninhabited. If you say:

    > I was blocked, so I fixed a bug, and rather than wasting time maintaining an internal fork in violation of the OSS project's license, I complied with that license by contributing my fix upstream.

I've never met a manager or a maintainer who would suggest that you open the can of worms by contacting a lawyer about it. We all know that intellectual property is a bit of a farce, especially as applied to software that was written jointly by an employee and model that was likely trained on the OSS project in the first place. But it's not a problem unless it's a Problem, so as long as no party is injured, why make it one?

[em-bee]

well except that there is no FOSS license that requires you to submit your changes upstream. so the license argument is not going to be valid in most cases. GPL only require you to share with users, so any in-house use of software does also not require you to share the code with anyone outside. AGPL might trigger sharing if the software is used in a website, but also only with users of the website, not with upstream.

only the maintenance argument holds, but that is a trade-off, not a legal requirement.