I'm a student at a US college, and I've been assigned a programming project to complete on my own. I wrote a program to solve a somewhat complex problem, and I'd like to release it under an open-source license so that others can use it and learn from it. However, I'm not entirely sure to whom the code's copyright belongs. The class' syllabus says nothing about the ownership of code produced for the class, but I don't want to take any chances.
Do I own the code?
If nothing is stated by the school that you signed and agreed to...copyright defaults to you, the author.
When you're paid it's a different set of rules - Look in the comments of this answer for some excellent resources from Stephen C and outis. With anything legal it's safest to get an opinion from the experts, in this case a lawyer. (Always a good idea actually, water pipes broken? call a plumber)
License it before you turn it in. :)
Do you think it's going to be a problem? What does the professor say? I'd just ask to see if it's going to be a problem before I got too worried about it. The university probably has someone you can ask too. Find that person and ask.
However, there's no contract where there is no exchange of value. They can't own it and also not give you something for it. When I worked at Universities, the ownership was always specified in my contract, whether the work belonged to the school, the government, the grant funder, etc.
Some of this might depend on state law, as well. There was a case in the Perl world where an employer asserted rights to open source code because New York law states that even work an employee does in the same field unrelated to his employment is also property of the employer.
If it really matters to you though, find a free law center near you and get an answer from a real lawyer.
Don't do this, even if you own the license, the school will accuse you of academic misconduct for providing answers to younger students, we had several cases like this at Ohio State.
Yes, I think that's stupid too, but instructors reuse course work for years and stuff like this would make it very hard for them to combat cheating. If you want to share reusable components, make sure it doesn't explicitly have the answers to any classwork.
Edit: If the program you wrote is interesting enough, and doesn't explicitly seem like classwork though, it's definitely worth it to talk to the professor, and maybe even work with him to write a professional journal article about it.
If you wrote a paper for an English or history class, you'd own that, wouldn't you? It's your work, and if someone else copied it and turned it in, that would be plagiarism and presumably they'd fail the project at the very least.
If you were paid to write said code, whomever paid you owns the rights to the code. If you were not paid (like for a class project), you own all the rights to the code.
IANAL, I would assume it should be specified in University policies.
For instance, University Policy Office of University of California specifies Copyright Ownership Policy
This Policy is intended to embody the spirit of academic tradition, which provides copyright ownership to faculty for their scholarly and aesthetic copyrighted works, and is otherwise consistent with the United States Copyright Law, which provides the University ownership of its employment-related works
and such it is clarified to whom such policy applies, for example ucop.edu says:
This Policy applies to University employees, students, and other persons or entities using designated University facilities
Now, regarding student work, it specifies as follows:
Ownership of copyrights to student works shall reside with the originator.
where originator is also clearly defined:
One who produces a work by his or her own intellectual labor.
Given this example, I would ask your office of your university for presenting you with such policy document. If no document is available, I think you need to refer to your government law, but no policy shall mean copyright belongs inherently to you.