Comment 4 for bug 356323

Another alternative is for a project to be able to specify "We require copyright assignment" as a setting, and to provide a system for project drivers to say "this person has assigned copyright" or "this patch has assigned copyright", while the _actual_ assignment mechanism takes place out of band.

If this were the case, then patch submission could raise a warning if you have not already assigned copyright.

However, I'm skeptical of this actually solving the problem of "I've done a bunch of work and now it's irrelevant because I need to transfer copyright." If the warning is on the patch submission page, then people are only going to see it when they are about to submit a patch. The only way to warn such potential contributors before they actually write code is to have documentation on the project's website.