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Is use of the GPL really decreasing?
Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 12 August 2009 12:12
Page 1 of 2
Is it reasonable to raise the question "does X still matter?" when the X in question is in use among nearly two-thirds of the target users under discussion?
What I'm referring to here is an article on the Infoworld website, with the headline: "Does GPL still matter?" The standfirst reads "As open source gets more commercial, GPL's idealism is overridden by developers' business needs."
The author has spoken to a few businessman, a lawyer, a consultant, and the chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, and drawn a number of conclusions, some of them reasonable, others which don't quite hold up.
The premise of the whole article is that use of the GPL could be - yes, that's a hypothetical - starting to slide.
The apparent basis for this thesis is a survey by a company called Black Duck Software. The article states that even though there was strong growth in GPLv3 adoption, the percentage of open source projects using GPL variants fell from 70 percent to 65 percent compared to the previous year.
There are no actual numbers provided and no link to the source of the data so the reader can compare figures. The article does provide a table with percentages.
Tracking down the real numbers isn't difficult though and they show that the use of the GPL isn't decreasing; there may be more and more and projects using open source licences these days, lessening the percentages, but the GPL numbers are only increasing.
This is not a one-off survey but a set of figures on adoption of the top 20 open source licences under use, and it is painstakingly updated month by month.
There are two glaring errors in the article - and one individual has pointed them out in the comments at the end of the article.
One is a statement that reads, in part, "...all software must be free, even if they have to force it to be free." The reference is to GPL advocates.
This is incorrect as the question of choice would not then arise - and the premise of the whole article itself would be null and void as it begins by presupposing that projects are moving away from the GPL.
CONTINUED
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