Copyright assignment

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Revision as of 10:22, 14 May 2026 by Dan Polansky (talk | contribs)
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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. However, GCC in particular seems to have dropped the copyright assignment requirement in 2021[1].
  • 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.

Examples of FOSS projects without copyright assignment:

Questions:

  • What is Python doing?
  • What is PostreSQL doing?

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

More examples are listed at Contributor license agreement#CLAs which restrict relicensing, 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:

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