For what it's worth: while I'm not a lawyer, I'm a past ASF board member, VP Legal Affairs, and VP Incubator. Not that you should take my "argument from author

For what it's worth: while I'm not a lawyer, I'm a past ASF board member, VP Legal Affairs, and VP Incubator. Not that you should take my "argument from authority" as gospel, but that should give some perspective on why I'm focusing narrowly on the issue of copyright assignment. I've explained these issues many many times to many many projects, dealt with conflicts over administrative control analogous in some ways to the one at hand, etc. Copyright assignment is extremely cumbersome and difficult. To achieve it, all copyright owners must be willing to give up their own copyright, which many organizations and many individuals are not willing (or even able) to do. From my standpoint, it is unthinkable that the .NET Foundation would say that their contribution model is to license, and then slip copyright assignment language into an agreement on the sly. There would be hell to pay if that were the case. The contribution models, how you run the organization, etc., they're quite different. EDIT: Mea culpa. I have found additional documentation that conflicts and reveals that there is now an an additional copyright-assignment track. See my soon-to-appear reply. > > Project means the projects owned or managed by Contributor and listed below that is assigned to the .NET foundation hereunder. > If this is assigning copyright to the .NET foundation, is it bad faith to not make that clearer? That clause doesn't assign copyright. While IANAL, from my perspective copyright assignment language would be much more specific than that. EDIT: There may be additional language later. > the project authors are providing a different document Yes, that's true unfortunately. I wish that the project author had provided the whole thing because that would make our discussion easier. I can't get at the actual current document because it's sent via Docusign, and I'd need to actually submit a project to the DNF to get at it. I tried, though, because clearing this misunderstanding is important. > What else is there to own in an open source project? In terms of intellectual property: copyright, trademarks, and patents. But then there is also administrative control over project resources: domains, Github organizations, possibly physical resources such as servers or test hardware, accounts at various places, upload permissions for distribution channels, occasionally bank accounts, etc. And specifically, this conflict is about administrative control over project resources and permissions on Github. > The trademarks? How many of these projects even have trademarks? Well, technically few have registered trademarks, but in general you get a trademark by using it in commerce. So all of them have at least a claim on a trademark, although it may not be enforceable if there's a conflicting registered mark or if the project name is too generic.