GPL Project Watch List for Week of 04/25

The GPL v3 Watch List is intended to give you a snapshot of the GPLv3/LGPLv3 adoption for April 19th through April 25th, 2008.

Happy Earth Day
In this green week where we support the protection of our environment, it is nice to work in the open source community that shares the same principals of efficiency and waste reduction. Over the past week 9 new AGPL v3 projects have been added to our database, which is a 13% increase in AGPL v3 projects, bringing the total to 77 AGPL v3 projects. The GPL v3 had a slow week with 28 new GPL v3 projects being added, bringing its total to 2212 GPL v3 projects. This is much lower than the average rate for the GPL v3, but it is only one data point. However, we are interested to see if the AGPL v3 redirects projects that would have adopted the GPL v3 or if projects that are currently under the GPL v3 switch over the the AGPL v3. This will be difficult to analyze, but we are keeping a close eye on the numbers to see if there are any significant shifts.

This Week:

• New Projects
• AGPL Booster

New project conversions this week include:

• sgeng: Fully AJAXed and JSONed Web CMS. Fast and easy site creation. Content, news, messages, users management. Accounting, commenting, banning, tabs, simple BB-codes, news, inter-user messaging system and on-site searching systems.
• InterLDAP: InterLDAP is a collection of modules designed around directories.
• Butterfly Organizer: Butterfly Organizer is a PHP/MySQL solution for organizing web accounts. Butterfly Organizer has a simple and intuitive menu which helps you control the entire application.

GNU Affero General Public License May Get a Boost
Ubuntu's Launchpad may adopt the AGPL, as stated in a recent article by Matt Asay. This could be the project AGPL needs to get its foot in the open source door. As with the GPL v3, the key issues to its adoption is how many and who. Just as important as how many projects are adopting a license, is who is adopting. The two are linked and perpetuate the other, which is why it is important to keep an eye on both figures. As we have seen in the past weeks, the numbers are slowly but surely gaining for the AGPL but it is still lacking in big name support. Clipperz, a relatively large project, is already licensed under the AGPL, but more large projects need to adopt the license for it to take off as a license. Perhaps the fast rate of adoption of the AGPL, as well as all the press, brought Ubuntu's eye to the AGPL, but surely if Launchpad decides to use the license the rate will increase further.

References:
http://www.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9927910-16.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=TheOpenRoad


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.



The Research Group (rdgroup@palamida.com)

• Ernest Park
• Antony Tran
• Kevin Howard