Contributions to Projects
Some open source projects seek copyright assignment from their contributors. This serves two purposes:
A project that owns copyrights has standing to enforce those copyrights in court without needing the contributor's participation or approval.
The project, and not the contributor, now has the right to make licensing decisions about the software.
Many authors of software refuse to assign their copyrights. The experience of musicians, photographers, writers, and artists in past generations warns us not to lightly give away that which we create. And the experiences of literally thousands of open source projects give us reason to believe that open source projects can thrive quite nicely with mere licenses from contributors ...
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