Your anecdote also emphasizes the requirement for open source projects to maintain rigorous intellectual property policies. Good on both you and the project for the appropriate handling!
Clean IP history is especially important for "universal donor" sample code intended to be copy/pasted. If there turns out to be an IP violation in library code, with luck it may be possible to excise it from the library -- and hopefully not too many downstream will have forked it. But when code is copy/pasted, the linkage is severed and the damage becomes increasingly difficult to repair.
For those reasons, I'd prefer to see something like a contributor list of public identities for collections of sample code, so that it is transparent who is making the licensing promises.
Clean IP history is especially important for "universal donor" sample code intended to be copy/pasted. If there turns out to be an IP violation in library code, with luck it may be possible to excise it from the library -- and hopefully not too many downstream will have forked it. But when code is copy/pasted, the linkage is severed and the damage becomes increasingly difficult to repair.
For those reasons, I'd prefer to see something like a contributor list of public identities for collections of sample code, so that it is transparent who is making the licensing promises.