Canonical chief executive Mark Shuttleworth has called for an uniform copyright assignment policy for contributors to free and open source software projects.

How many contributions are being left out of CUPS because of this stupid copyright assignment? It looks to me that such software is doomed to remain crippled as long as companies like Apple are in charge of their maintenance.

There is free software. And there is free software by Apple. And Oracle. And Canonical.

A little while back, Michael Meeks published a lengthy piece about copyright assignment (not nearly as lengthy as the articles he links to on untangling Wittgenstein's net). Go on, read it (Michael's stuff, not the net). It's worth your time. When you get to the bottom, follow the link to Dave Neary's take on assignment as well.

Michael Meeks, Bradley Kuhn and Mark Shuttleworth discussed copyright assignment agreements and copyright licensing agreements at the Desktop Summit in Berlin. GNOME Foundation executive director Karen Sandler moderated the short but revealing discussion. Be sure to also read the insightful comments to the article.

Michael Meeks's posting on copyright assignment is not a quick read, but it's worth the effort; this is a more thorough look at the issue than your editor has seen elsewhere.

Does contributing your code to some FOSS project automatically give away your copyright on that code?

Copyright assignment can be ethical, and can unify a project under common ownership, or it can be misused to impose control and bypass the GPL, indemnify the code against patent infringement, and subvert the developers' intent in contributing to an 'open source' project.

The GNOME Foundation has set out its rules for modules which require copyright assignment, but it will come down to a case-by-case decision for future modules

"Free Software Foundation Europe welcomes the adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement by the K Desktop Environment project. The FLA is a copyright assignment that allows Free Software projects to assign their copyright to single organisation or person.