With some fanfare, the CodePlex Foundation launched itself late last week (codeplex.org).  This has generated quite a bit of discussion on blogs, twitter, email lists, podcasts, and everything else.

About the Copyright Assignment

One of the items on the CodePlex Foundation that is causing lots of concern is the sample license agreement that assigns copyright to the CodePlex Foundation. Here, I’m leaning heavily on my experience with publishers.

First of all, the only way you can assign copyright to another party is if it is yours. OK, that’s obvious, but I think lots of people are missing that. When I sign the contract for a book with a publisher, I do assign the copyright to the publisher (in return for some considerations). The publisher needs me to warrant that the work is *my original work*.  The same would be true for Open Source software projects. Hypothetically, for me to assign my OSS project’s copyright, I would have to assert that it’s my original work.

There is another way to assign copyright, which will be necessary for CodePlex and OSS to work. If you ask everyone that contributes to your OSS project to assign the copyright to the project (or you), you do hold the copyright, and therefore you can assign it. (The Apache Foundation Individual Contributor License Agreement contains language necessary to assign the copyright over.)

Note that you can (as the original author) grant a non-exclusive license as an alternative to assigning the copyright. That’s also common in many OSS contributor agreements. I’m not sure how much weight that gives in IP legal entanglements, but it seems to work for the Apache Foundation, and the MySQL organization. I’ll defer to others with more knowledge.