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.