Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a stupid synthesis, though, just like the one from the article: > The repository is MIT-licensed, and clearly advertised as such, so it’s reasonable to expect all contributions are made under that license You don't have to assume anything, given the way pull requests work. It's not like it's a code snippet extracted from one of their comments on the bugtracker and then subsequently integrated upstream. They publ…
> So if they have the rights to grant it to you, then you can use it under the MIT license That seems rather the crux of the problem: did they have the right to upload that patch with the given license, or did they commit fraud first? Being able to see the LICENSE file still intact (which GitHub has promised you can do indefinitely for any PR branch even if the contributing repo got deleted) would not protect against…
I'm not a lawyer, either, but that doesn't mean I'm not qualified to comment about whether it's useful. It's not. It's stupid, and they're wrong, whether they have a lawyer endorsing it or not. Don't let the Gell-Mann amnesia take root. There are just as many* cargo cult lawyers as there are cargo cult programmers.
* this is a conservative estimate