Project foundations matter. A project's priority should be to build infrastructure.
But rushed infrastructure often neglects licensing. The Debian wiki is a great example of how even a highly licensing-aware project failing to specify a license on day 1 can remain a mess decades later. If a precious but unlicensed wiki page has contributions from someone who disappeared, can you integrate it in the product?
The Real™ prevention from these headaches, appropriation and forkability concerns is making a (default) license opt-out or mandatory on all contents, including documentation, websites, issue reports and discussions.
But if you're late or contributing to a project struggling to agree on a license, you can at least avoid worsening matters yourself by adding a notice to your own contributions.
License notices
You can copy the following notices to each “page” you contribute to, or link to the relevant one. The following anchor names are guaranteed stable:
- https://www.philippecloutier.com/Common+infrastructure+licensing#its
- https://www.philippecloutier.com/Common+infrastructure+licensing#forum
The following license notices may evolve. If you are concerned about evolution, you may use the page history to link to a particular version of this page.