> 
> Does something along those lines end up working legally, or is it worthless, no better than just continuing to ignore the problem, so you might as well just continue to ignore the problem? Or if it is potentially workable, does anyone have examples of projects using such a system, ideally with some evidence some lawyer has said it’s worthwhile, including a lawyer-vetted digital contributor agreement?



I'm not sure the extent of this risk for most small projects, esp. if you don't think you will ever want to relicense it.

If I send you a pull request, and it is like a couple of characters different because there was a syntax error, or I add a couple of lines, and I don't bother to change the license and copyright statement, I don't think it is too unreasonable to accept the patch.  If I write dozens of files for a new module that is sort of unrelated to the original code and I don't include the project's copyright statement in the code, then I could see you saying "hey, can you clarify if you are granting me the copyright, or maybe you want to slap a copyright notice on that yourself" before you accept the contribution.

But maybe you could just make a statement in your README along the lines of "If you send a pull request to this project or otherwise make a contribution of code you and your employer to grant a non-excluive royalty free perpetual redistribution license to Acme Inc and you represent that you have the rights to do so"

Maybe you could argue that the act of submission of the modified code is an implicit grant of the code consistent with the terms of the license of the original code.

The cool thing about revision control, and accepting pull requests, is that it keeps a line by line record of who committed the code, so if there were a problem you might have a chance at extracting and re-writing the tainted contribution.

Of course, I am not a lawyer; you probably need to talk to your contracts and grants people or OGC.

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