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In spite of some of the advice on Answers.OnStartups, I've recently open-sourced a library I wrote for a vertical niche (http://atdl4net.org/ if anyone is interested, although it isn't too relevant to the question). I understand that if you want to allow people to contribute and subsequently be able to include their contributions in the offering, then you need a contributor license.

Does anyone have an tips for preparing a contributor license? - things to make sure you include, pitfalls to be wary of, etc? Even pointers to some good examples would be a help (or for that matter, known bad examples).

Thanks in advance - Steve.

(In case anyone's wondering, the motivation for open-sourcing the library is slightly involved, but one reason is to encourage adoption of the industry standard that it implements, as my business model is built around increasing usage.)

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Nice web site. Good luck with the project(s). I hope you keep us informed about how you implement this. – TimJ♦ Oct 14 '10 at 16:02
Thanks Tim - appreciate the encouragement! – Steve Wilkinson Oct 18 '10 at 7:28

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The Oracle/Sun contributor agreement for MySQL contributions is a good start:

You may find similar documents in most commercial backed open source projects.

That said, I highly encourage you to contact a specialized lawyer.

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Thanks for that link - it's particularly useful as the Oracle agreement itself is licensed under Creative Commons, so my firm could re-use it (with attribution, of course). Yeah - fully understand the need to involve the lawyers. – Steve Wilkinson Oct 13 '10 at 16:06
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Following a little bit more research, I came across the following article:

http://opensource.com/law/10/9/copyright-aggregation - it seems that this is a common problem for firms working in the open source space, and there is a strong desire to standardize the whole area of contributor agreements.

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