What are the corresponding assembly attribute values for an open source project (LGPL)?
I just started working on an open source project. The project is hosted on CodePlex and I am working on it in my spare time. What would be the appropriate values for the default assembly attributes (listed below)?
[assembly: AssemblyCompany("")]
[assembly: AssemblyCopyright("")]
[assembly: AssemblyTrademark("")]
I was surprised to see the AssemblyCompany and AssemblyCopyright attributes in several projects (in CodePlex as well as Google Code):
xUnit.net
[assembly: AssemblyCopyright("Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation")]
[assembly: AssemblyCompany("Microsoft Corporation")]
DotNetNuke:
<Assembly: AssemblyCompany("DotNetNuke Corporation")>
<Assembly: AssemblyCopyright("DotNetNuke is copyright 2002-2010 by DotNetNuke Corporation. All Rights Reserved.")>
Moq:
[assembly: AssemblyCompany("Clarius Consulting, Manas Technology Solutions, InSTEDD")]
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Put your name (and your company, if applicable) and copyright statement in the assembly. This will not affect the applicability of the license if the license itself is incompatible with copyright; you can still license the software as you see fit.
You don't need to give up copyright to license your code to others, unless you put that code in the public domain. Retention of copyright means that you decide how the software is distributed.
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Under the LGPL (and most other FOSS ) you retain copyright, so you can put "Copyright (C) 2009-2010 MichielVoo. All rights reserved." This does not affect the license, on the contrary, it needs to defend the copyright, for which the license depends on the observance of the "ownership" of the work.
You should also make sure that ever the source file in your product / project contains a license stub.
A trademark is not required unless you actually hold a trademark on something related to the project. For example, Mozilla owns the "Mozilla" trademarks and Firefox-related works, so they endorse those trademarks. If your project is called "FooBar" and you hold the trademark for that term, then you would say it there.
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