Why does Sun require copyright assignment for OpenOffice.org?
Many open source projects require a copyright assignment so that the code base can be legally protected as a whole by one entity without having to worry about the copyrights for different pieces. Other prominent examples of projects requiring copyright assignment are the Mono project and the Evolution project, which both require assigning the copyright to Novell. The Red Hat Directory Server project requires assigning the copyright to Red Hat. The Sun Contributor Agreement is very liberal, as it requires sharing the copyright instead of fully transferring it and also guarantees that published contributions will remain under an open source license forever.
