Ownership in Software

[Niall Douglas]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

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
> 
> 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





-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: idw's PGP-Frontend 4.9.6.1 / 9-2003 + PGP 8.0.2

iQA/AwUBQIgidsEcvDLFGKbPEQKYLgCg4R5sjM5qflE84KK9M+0TLRh+CT4AoP2+
H7HjAZmrhDNi4FuOVGyXy9fx
=8KcA
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----