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Strange!
But how can an open source project be sure that an important contributor does have the right to transfer his copyrights to the project???
Sounds like lots of income for lawyers...
UPDATE: To be more precise: Imagine you buy a car and you get a written guaranty that the deal was legal. But if the car was stolen, even years ago, you will certainly loose this car!
Now of course you have the option to sue the seller for compensation for the car...
But with software the copyrights can cost over the years a multitude of what the contributor can be able to pay!
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The FSF is, as has been noted, very careful on this issue. But most projects operate on the principle that it is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.
First of all copyright rules only matter if the copyright holder chooses to complain. Such complaints usually don't happen unless there is another issue between employee and employer, or if the employer thinks they have something to gain by complaining. So, for instance, if an employee in NY, NY has worked in personal time on a startup, the employer may take ownership of the startup. However there is little to be gained, and lots of bad publicity to be lost from getting in a legal battle with an open source project.
Secondly even if such a complaint happens, demonstrating that you had cause to believe you were operating in good faith is a valid defense against past infringements. You will then be able to satisfy the court by working to stop future infringements. Which means that you have to take the offending code out of your code base. (Source control makes tracking down this kind of thing fairly easy.) To borrow your car analogy, if the car was stolen years ago but you bought it in good faith, you're not going to be successfully sued now for having driven it in the past. All that's going to happen is that you'll lose the car, and won't be allowed to drive it in the future.
So realistically if an open source project accepts possibly questionable code there is little risk of anything bad happening to them, and if something does happen, it probably won't be a big deal.
Finally be aware that law in this area varies wildly. In New York, ownership defaults to the employer. In California, ownership not only defaults to the employee, but by law you cannot sign that right away. (I've long maintained that this is one of the reasons that there are more startups in California than New York.) I would expect that there is a similarly wide variation in Europe about the work for hire doctrine.
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