Copyrights and contribution sign-off

When people think about license and IP management, the conversation often focuses on outbound licensing – that is, what license the code from the project uses. But just as important (or even more important) are the terms that the code comes into the project under, because if it doesn’t come in under the license and/or terms that will work with the license the code is released under, it makes it difficult on downstream users to use the code.

In smaller projects, this is often overlooked, as you often will only see a few contributors to the code base, so project maintainers tend not to pay much attention to contribution sign-off. But this can quickly get out of control, especially if you have someone come to the project and say, “Hey, that code looks like something someone pulled from my commercial product.” It gets awkward quickly here at this point, as the project is suddenly scrambling to see who added the code, hoping...