I apoligize in advance for the length of this post. This is exactly the type of problem a policy like this is designed to avoid. You might be worried about losing your rights, but IDA is equally justified in worrying about theirs.
For example, you might remember a while back an attempt by the mozilla organization to change some of the licensing terms on the source tree. Because contributors were not required to assign the copyright to a central entity, each and every copyright holder had to be contacted regarding the proposed changes. Surely you can imagine what happened when a few years passed and the only contact information you had was a name and a [no longer working] email address.
As far as I can see, there are two possible problems with the current policy (not that I have a problem with it as is):
1. Free and unrestricted use of my contributions (and only my contributions).
2. Ego (IMHO a silly reason not to contribute).
I think #1 could be solved by an automatic (non-exclusive, non-terminable, non-restricted) license grantback for contributions. Is this a possibility?
Number 2 is a little bit trickier, but if you're talking about a relatively major contribution, what's wrong with putting your name in the source header? Something like this (taken from lib/modules/Protocols.pmod/LPD.pmod):
// This is a module for pike. // 3 July 1998 hww3@riverweb.com Bill Welliver // // $Id: LPD.pmod,v 1.8 2002/06/17 10:54:29 mast Exp $ // $Id: LPD.pmod,v 1.9 2002/06/17 11:46:58 grubba Exp $ //
I get credit for writing it, but it's copyrighted by IDA.
Now, I can certainly understand one's nervousness about the tendencies of lawyers (particularly when you're dating an ip lawyer :)). However, if you've got #1 covered and documentation in hand, what more can you do?
Bill
So much for the history we wanted to improve on when moving Pike to IDA. As Nilsson points out, the CVS access agreement aims for rules that simplifies managing the repository. The perhaps most important part of that is to allow changes to Pike that requires full ownership
- and without getting in touch with countless individual contributors.