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Sep. 19, 2009

In the past 5 to 6 weeks, the GPL version 2 open source license dropped below the 50 percent share mark for the first time since some obeservers started tracking the data more than two years ago.

Up until today, a majority of open source projects were using the GPLv1 license, but GPLv2 share has eroded pretty steadily over the past two months or so.

In July of last year, GPLv2 was used by a little less than 58 percent of all projects. Today it stands about 8 percent lower at under 49.6 percent market share, which means roughly 100,000 projects.

During the same period, LPGL 2.1 is down about 1 percent and GPLv3 is up a tad over 3.3 percent.

That is not to say that GPL is going away, certainly not by a long shot... GPL version 2 is still by far the most widely used open source license. At over 49 percent of all OS projects, it is used by 4 times more projects than the number two license which is the LGPL version 2.1 at about 9.6 percent of overall market share.

Collectively, the GPL family of licenses accounts for more than 66 percent of all open source projects in the Black Duck KnowledgeBase.

Some in the Linux community can’t say enough about the FSF and the incredible contribution that they have made to the IT industry in creating the GPL family of licenses.

Some observers might be concerned now that GPLv2 appears to be falling in share faster than GPLv3 is growing. Some are even more concerned that the leaders of the open source community haven’t put more emphasis on Affero class licenses which strengthen the copy left in client-server applications.

In data that we get from the Black Duck Knowledgebase and from mining searches on Koders.com, it is becoming more and more clear now that all technologies associated with Internet applications (JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, Ruby, etc) are on the rise.

Overall, the top ten licenses cover a little over 92.9 percent of all projects versus about 94 percent in July of last year. This tells us that Linux application developers are still creating "boutique licenses".

In the Aug. 14, 2009 KnowledgeBase update to customers and Linux users, there is a catalog of 1,698 open source licenses.

This means that a little over 204 new licenses were catalogued in the last twelve months or so. Some of these licenses are copyleft-class.

It will be interesting to see what the next 12 months have in store for us. There's no question that v.3 is gaining momentum faster than is v.2. Then again, how can anyone predict any numbers that can be reasonably accurate in these fast-changing times?

As always, we will keep you posted.

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Source: The Linux Foundation (LF).

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