Copyright assignment

Unlike in some other free/open-source software (FOSS) projects, there is no copyright assignment in FreeMind. There is no legal entity directly associated with the FreeMind project (SourceForge, while hosting FreeMind, is not that entity) and there is no other entity to which copyright could be assigned. The copyright is held by the individual contributors, to their individual contributions (see also Credits). As a result, a relicensing of FreeMind away from GNU GPL V2+ (see also Licensing) is unlikely since it would require an agreement of all copyright-significant contributors. What follows is reporting on the subject of FOSS and copyright assignment in general, going to greater length than would be strictly necessary for FreeMind project.

Examples of FOSS projects that require copyright assignment:

• Some GNU projects require copyright assignment to Free Software Foundation (FSF) founded by Richard Stallman, probably a proponent of copyright assignment.
  • GNU Emacs does[1].
  • GBD does[2]
  • GNU Coreutils do[3]
• There was probably something like copyright assignment of OpenOffice to Oracle (previously Sun); this would have to be clarified and double checked. It would be interesting to find out what Apache Open Office is doing.
  • From Wikipedia NeoOffice: "Sun first released OpenOffice.org under both the LGPL and SISSL, later under only the LGPL, with a requirement for copyright assignment for any contributions to the main code base, which allowed Sun to create proprietary versions of the software (notably StarOffice)." This is unsourced, possibly inaccurate or slightly inaccurate.
• In Open Office, there seemed to be something like assigned joint copyright, which seems different from copyright transfer; requires more research and double checking.

Examples of FOSS projects that do not require copyright assignment:

• Some GNU projects do not require copyright assignment to FSF.
  • GCC seems to have dropped the copyright assignment requirement in 2021[4].
• Linux (Jakob 2014)
• Perl 5 (Jakob 2014)
• LLVM (Jakob 2014)
• LibreOffice (Corbett 2010)
• KDE (Neary 2009)
• Inkscape (Neary 2009)
• Scribus (Neary 2009)
• GIMP (Neary 2009) [is GIMP not part of GNU project?]
• GNOME (Neary 2009) [is GNOME not part of GNU project?]

Questions:

• What is Python doing?
• What is PostreSQL doing?
• If the contributor lives in and contributes from a country whose copyright law does not allow transfer of ownership, how does that legally work, if at all?
• Does the term copyright assignment imply copyright transfer? Or does it also cover joint copyright?

A related concept is of contributor agreement. Not every contributor agreement involves copyright assignment. Example projects with contributor agreements:

• ASF Contributor Agreements | Apache Software Foundation, apache.org
• Python[5][6]

More examples are listed at Contributor license agreement#Users, wikipedia.org.

FreeMind team leads/directors (Joerg Mueller, Daniel Polansky and Christian Foltin) did not ask contributors to sign a contributor agreement and send it via email. There is no text of FreeMind contributor agreement available; such a document or text does not exist. This seems to stand in contrast to Apache Software Foundation.

Links:

• Copyright transfer agreement, en.wikipedia.org
• Contributor license agreement, en.wikipedia.org
• Developer Certificate of Origin, en.wikipedia.org
• Why the FSF Gets Copyright Assignments from Contributors, gnu.org
• A Qualitative Study on the Adoption of Copyright Assignment Agreements (CAA) and Copyright License Agreements (CLA) within Selected FOSS Projects by Sylvia F. Jakob, 2014, jipitec.eu
• Free Software Foundation (FSF) - GCC - glibC - Gnulib - copyright, author unclear, 2021, moorcrofts.com