Do I need a Contribution Agreement for my BSD licensed project?
Does it protect me, or the contributors?
Should I be wary of contributing to a project that does not provide a Contribution Agreement?
I have potential contributors who've never seen a Contribution Agreement before and are wary to sign one.
I also want to contribute to some projects, but I want to know if I will be safer in the future from legal issues if they have a Contribution Agreement.
First, if you haven't already, you should try actually reading the BSD license being used. They're usually pretty small and self-explanatory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses
The main purpose of it is to protect authors of open source projects from having credit stolen from them should someone decide to branch off or copy their work.
If you plan on contributing to an open source BSD license project you shouldn't have anything to worry about. As a courtesy, it's always nice to make the original author aware of your contributions though.
Regarding contribution agreements: I read through a few of the more popular Contribution Agreements and it appears they are only there to protect project owners from being legally vulnerable to anything illegally contributed into the project. So in other words, it's there to protect project owners from their contributers. Legally speaking, this should also bail users out of any trouble if they unknowingly use illegal code.
Hope this helps you, good luck!
In the communities with which I am familiar, the issue is liability management. Some semi-bad actors, like Sun (at java.net) try to use contribution activities to grab rights. At ASF and Eclipse and elsewhere, on the other hand, there is a legal effort to protect both contributors and users from patent trolls and other beasties.
Hypothetically, each individual contributor is open to harassment from patent trolls or other claiming that they stole something. On the other hand, users are potentially liable in some cases, as well. The various open source foundations exist to try to protect everybody, by on the one hand taking steps to ensure clear provenance of the incoming code, and on the other hand offering legal indemnification.
This isn't something you can necessarily achieve all by yourself by collecting contributor agreements without a corporate legal entity. That's why there's a mountain of plain old open source code out there with no agreements at all.
It's quite unrelated to the BSD license. Nothing stops you from opening up an svn repo and simply stating that you only want code in there with a BSD notice on it. Or an AL. Or a GPL. Unless you're trying to put one over on people, a contributor agreement comes into play only if you want to offer your contributors or users or both more legal protection. Read up at apache.org if you like for one source of more information.