I'm interested to know what type of measures folks around here take to address IP ownership issues when they accept or provide patches.
I know that the Cygwin project requires a copyright assignment from anyone who provides more than a "trivial" patch. The assignment may have to include a statement from the contributor's employer as well. http://cygwin.com/contrib.html says:
If your change is going to be a significant one in terms of the size of your code changes, be aware that you will have to sign over the copyright ownership of your code changes to Red Hat or the FSF (depending on the source file) before we can include your changes in the main source tree. Your employer may also have to send us a disclaimer stating that they have no claims to your contribution. This is necessary for liability reasons. Here is our standard assignment form for changes to Cygwin that you can fill out, sign, and send back. It shouldn't end up being that much of a pain. If you have any questions, please send them to the cygwin mailing list.

Perl itself is completely lax in this area, so I find it hard to believe that they would require that level of diligence.

In reply to Re: What if it were you instead of Linus? by ysth
in thread What if it were you instead of Linus? by grantm

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