In July 2007, version 3 of the GNU General Public License barely accounted for 164 projects. A year later, the number had climbed past 2,000 total projects. Today, as announced by Google open-source programs office manager Chris DiBona, the number of open-source projects licensed under GPLv3 is at least 56,000.
And that's just counting the projects hosted at Google Code.
In a hallway conversation with DiBona at OSCON, he told me roughly half of all projects on Google Code use the GPL and, of those, roughly half have moved to GPLv3, or 25 percent of all Google Code projects.
With more than 225,000 projects currently hosted at Google Code, that's a lot of GPLv3.
If we make the reasonable assumption that other open-source project repositories Sourceforge.net and Codehaus have similar GPLv3 adoption rates, the numbers of GPLv3 projects get very big, very fast.
The data becomes even more significant, however, when you consider the number of active projects on Google Code, Sourceforge, and elsewhere. Google's ratio of active projects is much higher than Sourceforge's, which generously sees maybe 12 percent of its total number of projects under active development.
Hence, even if GPLv3's overall numbers may still seem small compared with GPLv2, its share of active projects may be quite large.
My recent flirtations with Apache-style licensing notwithstanding, clearly there's life remaining in the GPL, and particularly Version 3.
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I read Richard Stallman's commentary on cloud computing in the UK's Guardian. Stallman is full of warnings about cloud computing:
One reason you should not use Web applications to do your computing is that you lose control. It's just as bad as using a proprietary program.
But he completely neglects to mention that he had a chance to seed the cloud, which is largely built using open-source software, with an upgraded GNU General Public License (Version 3), and he demurred. Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation failed to protect the cloud when they had the chance, finally capitulating to industry pressure with the Affero GPL, an inelegant but workable sop.
Ars Technica is right to suggest that Stallman's doom-and-gloom about cloud computing is "myopic" and utters a final judgment well before even a provisional judgment is warranted.
But Stallman's biggest fault here is that he criticizes a problem that his own inaction created.
ExtJS is a cool JavaScript framework for writing web applications. It is, quite possibly, the best of its kind. My own engineers were salivating at the chance to use it.
Unfortunately, ExtJS is of many minds when it comes to licensing its product. It pretended that the software was LGPL, but only insofar as that meant many people using it...and many people paying to use it. (Hint to the ExtJS business team: LGPL and Apache licenses are impotent to compel payment.)
The company took the hint, re-releasing the code under GPLv3, causing consternation in some quarters. Why the concern? Well, because it meant that freeriders would now clearly have to pay, or distribute their own software under the GPL. Many don't like having to pay for value, particularly if it's GPL'd.
All of which has caused some to fork the ExtJS project. Given the dubious open-source provenance of ExtJS, this is not as easy (or advisable) as it might appear. If ExtJS were never truly LGPL, as the messed-up licensing would seem to suggest, then forking a proprietary product is called...copyright infringement.
It didn't have to be this way.
... Read MoreIn my estimation, the GPL is by far the world's best open-source license for business. If Palamida's recent count of GPLv3-licensed projects is any indication, business in open source is very, very good:
Our database now contains over 2,000 projects that are using the GPL v3. At this rate the GPL v3 is being adopted by 1,000 projects every 4-5 months, and if the trend continues, the license will be used by 5,000 projects by the end of the year.
It will take time for GPLv3 to achieve the same level of trust that GPLv2 has enjoyed, but at this rate it may be happening sooner rather than later.
In the meantime, Palamida, a request: Could we get a count on the number of projects using the Affero GPL (AGPL)? It will be miniscule today but I'd be interested in following its growth.
Volantis just released its Mobility Server under the GPLv3 license, which should go a long way toward helping to grow Volantis' community further. As I wrote recently about Funambol and open-source mobile projects, it's hard to conceive how any proprietary software company can compete with open source in mobile.
It's not a question of software. Anyone can write that. Rather, it's a question of keeping pace with device proliferation, as OStatic suggests:
Volantis had already made its Mobility Server available as a free download in late 2007. By open sourcing it, the company is looking to the broad development community to help deliver web sites and applications aimed at mobile users for delivery on an ever-increasing range of mobile devices.
... Read More
Whatever the proprietary Neanderthals may think, it's becoming clearer by the day that open source is, or will become, the natural state of software. "Nature" exerted her will yet again with the announcement that Electronic Art's SimCity has been released as open source under the GPLv3 license. The game was written back in 1983 (actually, before then) and so much of the code is too old to be useful except for research purposes.
But there's a lot of value in that, as Bill Simser notes:
There's still a lot of craptastic code in there, but the heart of the software (the simulator) hasn't changed. I know there will be efforts underway to port it to a better platform, replace the age old graphics with new ones, rewrite the graphic routines with modern-day counterparts, etc. The modern challenge for game programming is to deconstruct games like SimCity into reusable components for making other games! The code hopefully serves as a good example of how to use SWIG to integrate C++ classes into Python and Cairo, in a portable cross platform way that works on Linux and Windows.
It's like starting over from a familiar core, rebuilding the game into entirely new possibilities. On days like this I wish that I could code....
Roberto Galoppini has declared the end to the "badgeware" debate but also potentially stirred it up again by noting that SugarCRM is using GPLv3 to insist that its logo be displayed by its SugarCRM Community users. SugarCRM is clearly within the bounds of GPLv3 by following its allowance for:
b) Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it;
In response, Roberto suggests:
...[I]t is now clear that SugarCRM and SugarCRM?s VCs do still care a lot about brand protection.... Read More
The numbers had been showing a steady clip supporting GPLv3. So, hot, right? But Evans Data ran a survey of developers showing that support for GPLv3 is actually cold. So, which is it?
Probably both.
From the Evans Data survey:
... Read MoreIt's official. GPLv3 is "open source." The Open Source Iniative (OSI) formally announced it today.
Now, most of you (like I, frankly) didn't think this was ever seriously in doubt. But the license took some heat at times on license-discuss, and needed to undergo the same process that every other truly open-source license must go through.
The community is better for this scrutiny. There are things about the process that undoubtedly need improvement. But at least a process exists, which is much more than one can say for the proprietary world. Try finding any sort of public review of licenses in the closed-source world.
Transparency, thy name is open source.
(Credit:
Palamida)
According to Palamida, this week has seen a 19% increase over last in the number of projects that have adopted GPL v3. As August 31st, our research indicates that 534 projects have officially adopted GPL v3, as compared to 450 on August 20, 2007. No new projects have adopted LGPL v3, with the number still holding at 27 projects.
Palamida also mentioned that it is "finding a number of projects that have adopted the GPL v3 (based on their web site, comments in the header files of their code, etc.) but they are failing to update their COPYING files, which still have the GPL v2 license texts.
So, maybe the numbers are even better than have been reported?
