GPL Project Watch List for Week of 02/22

The GPL v3 Watch List is intended to give you a snapshot of the GPLv3/LGPLv3 adoption for February 16th through February 22nd, 2008.

February 22nd - Happy Birthday George Washington
Hopefully everyone had an enjoyable three day weekend, celebrating the founding fathers of our country. On this Presidents Day week, ending on Washington's birthday, our GPL v3 count is now at 1783 GPL v3 projects, as compared to last weeks number of 1740 GPL v3 projects. Our LGPL v3 database has grown to 173 LGPL v3 projects, an increase of 19 LGPL v3 projects or a 12% increase from our recent push. The GPL v2 or later count is now at 6437 GPL v2 or later projects, a result from a few conversions.






















New project conversions this week include:

• xBaseJ: This is a Java based xBase engine to read write and update dbf files.
• xlslib: A multiplatform C++ library for dynamic generation of Excel .xls files containing multiple worksheets.
• Entangled: Entangled is a distributed hash table (DHT) and peer-to-peer tuple space, based on Kademlia. It is written in Python, and makes use of the Twisted framework.

Story of the week
Legal Guidelines
As FOSS grows, so do the legal issues that surround it and the community is going to have to better inform themselves of the code they produce and use. Often we have seen the misuse of a license, perhaps due to the incomplete understanding of the terms. Yes, it can be a hassle applying a license to code that has already taken up much of your time, but if your work does end up being the next big thing you would want it used exactly how you had intended.

Understandably, law is not an expertise of many people in the community, seeing as there are more CS degrees than Law degrees, which is why we muse give thanks to organizations such as the Software Freedom Law Center. They have recently released a thorough document outlining current legal issues in FOSS and information on main licenses. The document, linked to below, is written in non-legalese and is directed to the average Joe, for better understanding of the law behind FOSS. It is a good read for all serious developers of FOSS and even goes over some tax exemptions that are possible for FOSS groups.

References
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/foss-primer.html

Notable Mention
Palamida actively takes submissions from visitors on updates on new GPL v3/LGPL 3 projects. We are amazed at the number of submissions we have gotten to date, but even more so, we are incredibly grateful to the almost 100 core contributors who have devoted their time and resources at helping us provide up-to-date information.