But which copyright owner? If the open source project has multiple contributors (not an unusual scenario in the slightest), it's not just a matter of one person's copyrights. Plus you get into the issue of the projects dependencies, and who owns those?
* requiring code to be assigned by the author to a single person/company, consolidating ownership
* building your entire base on friendly licensed software (3BSD) and ducking any GPL
So it’s very easy to say, for example, that the Mozilla Foundation owns all the code that makes up Firefox - they won’t accept your pull request otherwise.
