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On 22 Apr 2004 at 11:22, Rui Miguel Seabra wrote:
I'd really like to find out how many freshmeat projects are under the GPL versus other licenses. That would answer this question once and for all (esp. if they can weight them with activity).
You've got lies, damned lies and statistics, and here they are: http://freshmeat.net/stats/#license
69% use the GPL, and a good second is the LGPL with 5.58%. The third, the original BSD license, has 3.85%.
And at sourceforge (which unfortunately also supports proprietary software, and is a banner for some of it): http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat%14
GNU GPL'ed projects are almost 36840 while the second most used, the GNU Lesser GPL is at little more than 5619. The third best is BSD license with somewhat more than 3704, bla bla bla.
These sites may not register _all_ projects, but they have larger samples than most "credible" surveys I've seen.
I'm amazed it's so large. I was concerned that many of the GPL projects might be unfinished so I fetched all production/stable from freshmeat - out of 8218 stable projects, 5216 are GPL which gives 63%. On Sourceforge the same is out of 10031 there are 6669 GPL which gives 66%.
I tried finding out the percentage of licenses in the FreeBSD ports collection as they're all active & useful packages and most importantly they carry dependency info. Unfortunately, it would seem their description doesn't carry license info :(
However, the above isn't as it seems. Libraries such as zlib are heavily reused and so their weight should be much higher and I think total source lines under the license should also be taken account of - therefore, every copy of the Linux kernel would have portions removed as they're under a more permissive license than the GPL (eg; zlib).
However I think it's safe to say at least 50% of all most popular OSS is GPLed.
Cheers, Niall