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Number of GPL v3 projects tops 2,000
Da Massive writes "The number of open-source projects that use the GNU General Public License Version 3 has grown to more than 2,000, according to Palamida, which sells software and services for tracking open-source code within a customer's code base. 'Our database now contains over 2,000 projects that are using the GPL v3. "At this rate the GPL v3 is being adopted by 1,000 projects every 4-5 months, and if the trend continues, the license will be used by 5,000 projects by the end of the year," states a recent posting on Palamida's blog.'"
I wouldn't want anybody straining themselves, so I'll do it for you.
The article itself does not have a distribution, but the blog linked to by the article does: Palamida blog complete with chart. There was a definite surge last year of GPL3 projects, followed a sharp decline in December. The number of add projects, however, has been slowly climbing for the first few months of 2008.
This makes it sound like there was a decline in GPL3 projects, which isn't the case. There was a decline in the growth rate of GPL3 projects, meaning that the number of GPL3 projects grew, only not as fast as in previous months.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
The GPLv3 is important for reasons that include:
1) If you receive software and hardware together from a vendor, and the software is released under the GPLv3 license, you have legal assurance that they will not attempt through hardware to prevent you exercising your right to change the code and deploy your changes. If you receive software released under the GPLv2 license, you do not have these assurances. You can reasonably expect that the pressure on the vendor to increase revenue will lead to them attempting to rent out the control they have over you to third parties.
2) If you use or redistribute software, and the software is released under the GPLv3 license, you have legal assurances that you will not wake up one morning and find that the software you have come to rely on is now subject to patents that the vendor received. If you receive software released under the GPLv2 license, you could suddenly be forced to pay large sums of money or stop using the technology. This is a large risk that can tank a business model that relied on having liberty to grow without increased intellectual property costs and suddenly does not have that liberty.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
You're right: my bad. Describing statistics can get very wordy, and I was trying to mitigate the wordiness - I guess I got carried away.
Just as an aside, I am in no way trying to detract from the accomplishments here; this is a very nice v3 adoption rate. I was just agreeing with the original poster that the statistics deserve better interpretation than a 'grade school average over time'.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
As for FISH (another protocol using the SSH delivery mechanism), you still have the obscurity problem (worse than ever). people using Mr. Softie I'm confused; are you talking about Samba here? Do you think that avoiding Samba makes you "harder" or something? Simply, Samba/CIFS is often the best tool for the job, even when Microsoft systems are not in play. Maybe you think it makes you more hardcore to use a huge hammer when you should be using a screwdriver, but it doesn't. It makes you a moron.