What are appropriate assembly attribute values for an open source (LGPL) project?

Question

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")]

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

Under the LGPL (and most other FOSS licenses) you retain the copyright, so you can put "Copyright (C) 2009-2010 MichielVoo. All rights reserved". This does not affect the license, on the contrary, it's needed to assert copyright, which is what the license relies upon to enforce the "ownership" of the work.

You should also make sure that ever source file in your product/project contains a license stub.

Trademark is not required unless you actually hold a trademark on something related to the project. For example, Mozilla owns trademarks to the "Mozilla" name and artwork related to Firefox, so they assert those trademarks. If your project is called "FooBar" and you hold a trademark to that term then you would assert it there.