I have just started working on an open source project. The project is hosted on CodePlex and I work on it in my spare time. What would be appropriate values for the default assembly attributes (listed below)?
[assembly: AssemblyCompany("")]
[assembly: AssemblyCopyright("")]
[assembly: AssemblyTrademark("")]
It surprised me to see the AssemblyCompany and AssemblyCopyright attributes on several projects (on 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")]
Put your name (and your company, if applicable) and a copyright statement into the assembly. It won't affect the applicability of the license, unless the license itself is incompatible with copyright; you can still license the software as you see fit.
You don't have to relinquish copyright to license your code to others, unless you're putting the code into the public domain. Holding the copyright means you get to decide how the software is distributed.