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If I have a project, licensed under terms similar to CC BY-NC-SA. It is not open source by definition, as no commercial use is allowed. I can of course put it on GitHub, and make the source code open to the public. If I am the only copyright holder there is no problem. However, what about if there are public contributions?

In detail, my question is, if there is a way to

  • use license terms to make sure any contribution made to this repo would imply acceptance of the code to be licensed under the same non-open source license; or
  • use license terms to make sure any contribution made to this repo would imply an unconditional, solely transfer of copyright to the project owner; or
  • use signed statement/agreement upon contribution to achieve the above purpose.

Note that the scope of this question is about legal feasibility. It does not involve 'whether anyone would be like to be such a contributor' or 'if such practice is good or bad in terms of business or community'.

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Is there a way to

  • use license terms to make sure any contribution made to this repo would imply acceptance of the code to be licensed under the same non-open source license; or

Because CC BY-NC-SA is a copyleft licence, this will probably work. s3b1 requires anyone sharing an adapted version of the work - which would include a contribution or patch derived therefrom - to do so under CC BY-NC-SA "or a BY-NC-SA Compatible License". That last is the wrinkle that would make me nervous about using the licence to achieve this, as you might end up having to track a bunch of compatible licences.

  • use license terms to make sure any contribution made to this repo would imply an unconditional, solely transfer of copyright to the project owner; or

No. I believe that some jurisdictions require copyright assignments to be in writing, and therefore explicit. Even when this is not the case, a click-through assignment is thought to be unreliable, so a mere licence statement noting that such an assignment has implicitly happened would be hard to defend.

*use signed statement/agreement upon contribution to achieve the above purpose.

This is the gold standard, the common and well-understood practice, and the route I'd advise you to take. You don't need to go for a full copyright assignment: a contributor licensing agreement (CLA) that specifies that contributions are made under CC BY-NC-SA, possibly also including a clause that permits you to relicense if you wish to retain that ability, will suffice.

As the answer linked above notes, it doesn't need to be a hand-signed agreement; digital signatures will generally do, and have the handy side-effect that the crypto keys exchanged as part of the process can be usefully used for other purposes (signing contributions, securely distributing secrets, etc.).

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