Makes sense, will be happy to merge this. Thanks!

One quick thing first: before the first contribution, we need a filled Contributor License Agreement (CLA).
PDF is available from:

https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson/blob/master/contributor-agreement.pdf

and all that is needed is to print, fill & sign, scan and email to info at fasterxml dot com.
Once this is done, I can merge any and all contributions to Jackson projects. But we need it to ensure all code can be distributed by us, and further re-distributed by users.

If you could do that when you get a chance I can merge this in, backport it in 2.5, and it should make it in 2.5.3 as well as 2.6.0.

makes sense, will do so shortly. Shouldn't be a problem given the last backport of #54 in this release is my coworker's :)

Should I worry about the build failure? Wasn't sure why my change would affect rake at all.

I'll see what gives test failure.