GPLv3: The pace (and plot) thickens

One week after Palamida reported a rather sluggish start to GPLv3 adoption, we're up 41% and growing quickly. This could represent 10% of all active open source projets.

Palamida reports:

As of 1pm PDT, July 13, our research indicates that 164 projects have officially adopted GPLv3, as compared to 116 projects on July 6. An additional 4 projects have adopted LGPLv3 bringing the total LGPLv3 projects to 7.

New project conversions this week include:

• GNU projects EMMS (Emacs Multimedia System, a clean and small application to play multimedia files from Emacs), PG (Privacy Guard, a replacement for openPGP)


• Non-GNU projects such as pluck (a clean, simple content management system), Kl?tzle (an animation program of Linux), and IcyOwl (a C++ IDE)

In addition, 79 new projects have licenses that now read ?GPL v2 or LGPL v2.1 or later,? bringing the total to 2,865. For a complete list of projects, see http://gpl3.palamida.com.

This represents a big leap over last week, and probably also indicates wider adoption than the total number of GPLv3 projects would indicate. Why? Because if you compare the 2,865 to the total number of Sourceforge projects (100,000+), it looks small. But as is commonly known, a large percentage of those projects (70%+ by some counts) are hollow shells and/or a single developer that rarely updates the project.

In other words, of the 100,435 Sourceforge projects (recognizing, of course, that some projects are self-hosted or hosted on Codehaus/etc.), maybe 30,000 are serious projects. So, maybe ~10% have moved to GPLv3. Not bad.