Thanks for the correction…I looked at the page you reference and was trying to get it right, but am still left feeling a bit confused.

The overall Moodle software package is Copyright © 1999 onwards, Martin Dougiamas with portions contributed/copyrighted by many others (see Credits and the source code itself) and all of it is provided under the terms of the GPL. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

That seems a bit like at least the start of a copyright assignment policy. I was gesturing toward the statement “The overall Moodle software package is Copyright © 1999 onwards, Martin Dougiamas,” but would be happy to learn a better way to characterize Moodle’s intellectual property practices. Any language you can suggest gladly welcomed.

My larger point is that someone owns open source code for projects like Moodle or Sakai, to contrast with Josh’s statement.