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June 30, 2008

The GNU GPL (General Public License) and GNU LGPL (Lesser General Public License) were last released on June 29 of last year. That was a year ago. Five months later, both licenses were joined by the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL). Looking back at all of this today, the Linux community and observers of open source software judge them a modest success, and credit them with continuing to educate people about open source software.

Palamida tracks numbers on various development projects that use a version of the GPL that contain a clause allowing contributors to use version 2.1 or later of the license, which includes version 3.0. These figures are 6,467 for the GPL and 372 for the LGPL.

Since the AGPL was not in widespread use until the third version, it is not included in these figures however.

Despite the broad difference in numbers, both Black Duck and Palamida agree on the overall trends. Both agree that, taking all versions and variants of the GPL as a single unit, they account for about 70 percent of all free licenses in use today.

What's more, both organizations agree that the adoption rate for the third versions of the GPL and LGPL remain steady at about 220 per month, and that this growth does not seem to have come at the expense of the second versions.

Estimated numbers on adoption of the GPL family vary somewhat, depending on whom you talk to. According to Doug Levin, president and CEO of Black Duck Software, a company that tracks open source code, 2,476 projects are now using the third version of the GPL, while 358 are using the LGPL and 72 the AGPL.

Palamida, a firm with a similar mission, gives roughly comparable numbers of 2,271 for the GPL, 261 for the LGPL, and about 100 for the AGPL. The difference in the numbers is explained by the fact that Black Duck's figures include planned transitions to the licenses, while Palamida's doesn't.

However, Palamida's higher numbers for the AGPL are due to the company's recent interest in the license, as evidenced by its own blog. The major difference in adoption rates comes with the AGPL. Levin is cautious about talking about trends with AGPL, pointing out that it has only been out for six months.

Levin says only that "there has been some pick up on the adoption of the AGPL." By contrast, Bui says that AGPL adoption "is really starting to take off." She predicts another 50 projects will be using the license in about six to eight weeks, and describes this estimate as "incredibly conservative."

She added that the AGPL is causing far more excitement than the latest versions of the GPL or LGPL, most likely because it received less attention in the consulting process that produced the third versions, and therefore came as more of a surprise.

By contrast, Bui says that the slow but steady adoption rates of the GPL and LGPL third versions was predictable. Instead of rushing to switch to the newest licenses, she says, "software projects have been just chugging along in their old, familiar lifecycles and when they converted to GPLv3."

The outspoken resistance by Linux kernel developers that was so highlighted during the consultation process may be slowing the adoption rate. "The fact that the kernel has not adopted GPLv3 is a significant part of any group's decision not to adopt," says Bui.

One trend in adoption rates of the third versions is that projects and companies that opposed them or were neutral during the consultation process do not seem to have changed their minds. "It seems that people who had significant concerns about it in early 2007 haven't moved from them," says Bui. As a result, while some prominent companies and projects have moved to the third versions, including SugarCRM, Sun Microsystems, and OpenOffice.org, others, equally influential, have not, including the Linux kernel and MySQL.

In addition, the Free Software Foundation has made considerable efforts to educate users about the licenses, such as its page about the advantages of the third version. Similarly, Levin says, "I believe that the GPL will have an average increase of about 10 percent per month over the next year. What that means is that there will be some 6,000 projects using the licenses a year from now. It will continue to grow and continue to be a factor in the mix of licenses, but the other licenses will continue to be used."

These suggestions are supported by Bui's observations at client sites of people using their knowledge of the GPL licenses to help plan product lifecycles. "That's due to the good work of the FSF," she says. "They have done a really good job of educating people about the GPL and raising their awareness."

Still another factor may be that the technology field has caught up with the licenses. When the licenses were being drafted about eighteen months ago, lockdown technologies were just starting to appear, so the language to prevent them was seen as unnecessarily radical.

Today, and with examples like the popular iPhone and other Linux phones, such provisions are starting to seem far-sighted.

How GPL licenses work
The licenses for most software projects are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee the developer's freedom to share and change free software to make sure it is free for all its users. This General Public License applies to most of the Free Software Foundation's software and to any other program whose authors commit to using it. You can apply it to your programs as well.

When the term "free software" is invoked, it is referred to freedom, not price. General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software and charge for this service if you wish, that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.

To protect the rights of software developers, restrictions are made that forbid anyone to deny rights or to ask to surrender some rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for developers if they distribute copies of the software, or if they are modified in any way.

If developers distribute copies of such a program, whether for free or for a certain sum of money, they must give the recipients all the rights that they have. They must also make certain that they, too, receive or can get the source code.

Source: IT Direction.

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