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56.2% of Software Developers use Open Source
cfelde writes " 56.2% of software developers use open source components by ZDNet's ZDNet -- Evans Data has found a rising trend toward including open source modules in software development world. While 38.1% said they used OSS modules in their applications in Spring of 2001, in the most recent survey, 56.2% said they had."
It's a bit low if you take in mind that nearly every developer has a copy of Firefox or some other tool.
Indeed, a complete license breakdown would be interesting. But to hazard some guesses... If you're using open source software, you're probably plugging in various libraries into your app for certain functionality. So most people (myself) included are using LGPL licensed libraries. Then there's zlib's license, which if nothing else is because of the sheer number of people who use, well, zlib. I don't know of too many libraries which use a BSD license, though there are a few which use MIT. There's also Apache, but not many take that either. And yes, there's also GPL, which due to it's happily infectious nature, is probably nto used that much. The breakdown for the top is probably LGPL on top, then zlib. After that, well, it's hard to say.
Most projects on sourceforge just use the GPL without thinking due to ignorance. This causes problems for corporate developers.
Uh, how do you know that this is a result of ignorance?
It could just be that they want their libraries to be GPL, and that they don't want people linking them into non-GPL products.
I see no reason that it should be obvious that libraries MUST be licensed LGPL. Licensing a library GPL confers an advantage to other GPL projects since they can use your library, and a disadvantage to non-GPL projects since they have to rewrite the whole thing themselves. To people with the FSF-mindset this is probably a good thing, since it encourages the liberation of software. Who knows, maybe one or two proprietary products end up getting GPLed just so they can use the library since their owners figure there isn't much downside to opening the code. With the LGPL they can just be lazy and link it in...
When you think about it, many proprietary projects out there could stand to be GPLed. The prominance of GPL code that these projects could otherwise use helps encourage proprietaryware to open up.