Probably a silly question but I’ve always avoided looking at the source code for anything which I think might later want to implement myself. If I avoid others

Probably a silly question but I’ve always avoided looking at the source code for anything which I think might later want to implement myself. If I avoid others’ IP I can claim I wrote mine in a clean-room and license my code on my own terms. The reason is that I believe if there’s even a whiff of me having seen someone else’s code then I can’t make any claim to the copyright and, in fact, they will claim it instead. So then imagine if I put up a pull request to synapse with a feature or bug fix but — crucially — I do so without signing a CLA. Do orgs like Matrix employ PR reviewers who work in dirty rooms (opposite of clean room) to review these, shielding their core devs from the accusation that they are reading others code without a CLA to transfer the copyright? An attack from a kind of Doctorow-esque scifi story: you publicly fix your competitors bugs for them without assigning copyright, tainting their dev pools’ ability to claim their own code was a clean room implementation.