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09 Jul 2007
The third version of the General Public Licence (GPLv3) has been adopted by 116 open source projects in its first week of operation, according to an overview compiled by software risk management firm Palamida.
A further three projects have opted for the Lesser General Public Licence, which offers fewer restrictions than the regular GPLv3.
The 119 projects represent less than one per cent of all open source applications, but do include several projects from the so-called GNU stack of applications developed by the Free Software Foundation.
It also includes a set of 69 applications from the Ruby Project, and individual applications such as the LiVES video editing software.
"The 119 are explicitly adopting GPLv3 to support the licence and the underlying philosophy," Theresa Friday, co-founder and vice president of marketing at Palamida, told vnunet.com.
Most regular open source projects preparing to switch licences will do so when they release a new version in the future, she added.
There are roughly 140,000 open source projects, of which 72 per cent are governed by the GPLv2.
Palamida's GPLv3 watch website is actively tracking 10,000 key open source projects such as Firefox, Mono and Samba.
A further 2,700 projects state in their licensing terms that they are governed by the 'GPLv2 or later', which essentially leaves it up to the end user to decide which licence to choose.
Palamida develops software that lets companies scan internally developed software to ensure that they are not running open source code without their knowledge.
The firm publishes the GPLv3 website as a service to the open source community.
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Do you agree?
More than that
Actually, it's at least 125 projects; obviously someone forgot to ask me. I wonder how many other people and projects have already made up their mind, but just not reached a new release yet?
Posted by: Lee 10 Jul 2007
Version of GPL NOT left up to the end user
Only the author of a document can change the license of a work. The freedom to use the "GPL v2 or later" is an option that the *author* can exercise, not the user.
Posted by: Marc Christensen 10 Jul 2007
A Week in the Life of GPL3
Although we did not see a mass exodus over to the GPL3 upon its release, it's important to note that a week is an extremely small measure of time with which to gauge its effect on OSS. While the first converts have made their move, a steady stream of projects have voiced either their commitment or their neutrality and it's important to keep an eye on both. Outright conversion to GPL3 is more self-explanatory than the projects who are leaving the decision up to users with the "GPL2 or later" clause. This squarely puts the onus on the organizations themselves to hash out the license and use details dependent upon their individual risk profiles. License ambiguity will be left to the legal teams to figure out with the developers. We hope that our site provides value by enabling visitors to keep a close watch on the latest happenings of projects they are interested in. It's a community site aimed at taking the FUD out of GPL3 while strengthening the open source community bonds.
Posted by: Melisa LaBancz-Bleasdale 09 Jul 2007