Copyright assignment

Unlike in some other 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).

Examples of FOSS projects that require copyright assignment:

• GNU requires copyright assignment to FSF.
• 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.
• In Open Office, there seemed to be something like assigned joint copyright, which seems different from copyright transfer; requires more research and double checking.

Links:

• Copyright transfer agreement, en.wikipedia.org
• Why the FSF Gets Copyright Assignments from Contributors, gnu.org