do developers need to assign rights to someone

Hi,

Just in case this is an issue.  I freely give all of my patches and  
changes to the R source code to whomever holds or keeps the copyright/ 
rights for this project.  If it matters I have not signed any FSF  
agreements but I have done so with Sun for OpenOffice.org and would  
be willing to do so for this project.

AFAIK there are only two common reasons for assigning-copying over
(instead of having just a license notice saying somebody can do
as he/she wish with your code as you intended) is

(1) possible copyright infringement is imminent, and the R core team
needs to sue somebody on your behalf

(2) dual-license/commercial licensing - i.e. the R core team want to
relicense R with a different license, then they need to have the 
copyright to do that.

situation (1) is rather unlikely for R, but you never know
- historically, the FSF uses that argument to request all changes to
GCC to be signed over, I think.

As for (2), Sun people for obvious reasons want to get you to sign over
copyright, because they want to relicense the openoffice code under
the commericial staroffice license.

I don't think either (1) or (2) applies too closely to R, but then, this 
is just my opinion...

HTL