Arranging for an automatic grant-back of the free and unrestricted use of your own contributions sounds like an ideal solution to me too. If nobody sees a reason why it wouldn't work, I think we should try to make some writeup along those lines.
You have my vote :)
Regarding the ego boost I would first like to hear that it is an important factor for people before we explicitly encourage it. As it is, such decorations have intentionally been removed from some files when we added the short general Pike info clause you find in most Pike files around the place.
I can certainly appreciate the concern about having people "marking their territory", but if it's a deal breaker for someone, I'm sure that having someone's name on it wouldn't kill us. An alternative to putting names in the code itself is to have a running Changelog, and when you add something noteworthy, you add your name with a description of the addition. The Caudium changelog works like this.
Also, for very complicated contributions (X, Calendar, LDAP come to mind), it can be very handy to know who originally thought it up, so you can ask questions about design, etc. I certainly don't think twice about fixing bugs in other people's code, if in fact they're bugs and not me misunderstaning designed behavior :)
Bill