Actually, no. Contribution and copyright are two different things. In the United States, every word you write is copyright by you. However, you can assign your

Actually, no. Contribution and copyright are two different things. In the United States, every word you write is copyright by you. However, you can assign your copy rights to another entity. This allows copyright and authorship to become disjoint, even though they start out as the same thing. Here is an example: The Apache Software Foundation requires copyright assignment on all contributed work. Developers who contribute code must assign their copyrights to the ASF. Their name is still in the contributor list, because they are a contributor of code. However, the Apache Software Foundation is the sole copyright holder of the works.