GPL Project Watch List for Week of 06/13

The GPL v3 Watch List is intended to give you a snapshot of the GPLv3/LGPLv3 adoption for June 7th through June 13th, 2008.

This Week:

• Week Summary
  
• New Projects
  
• FOSS licenses based on US Copyright law
• User Contributions

Two More Weeks...
Only two weeks until the anniversary of the GPL v3 license and the creation of this tracking project. We have come a far way and continue to bring relevant and accurate license information. We hope you have made use of our data and have enjoyed reading our blog.

This week our GPL v3 count is at 2592 GPL v3 projects, and increase of 59 GPL v3 projects. There was speculation as to whether the AGPL v3 would draw projects from the GPL v3 conversion rates, but this does not seem to be happening. The AGPL v3 count is up 7 projects bringing it to 109 AGPL v3 projects. The LGPL v3 number is at 251 LGPL v3 projects, up 9 projects from last week.






















New project conversions this week include:

• EasyVote: EasyVote is a new easy to use, secure and transparent cryptographic online voting scheme for small elections (up to 500 voters).
• ERP4U: ERP4U / ERP for You / Enterprise Resource Planning for You -- Enterprise Resource Planning web based platform implemented on top of Ruby on Rails.
• Bluetooth Remote: Control your computer using a bluetooth enabled mobile phone. Move the mouse cursor send key strokes and control the most common applications such windows media player, internet explorer, firefox.

The Open Source "Market" Killed the Tools Market
Though open source tools can be sold, many are offered for free by developers. The open source market is an odd one since the price of the code is, for the most part, just the time to download the software. The fact the most open source code is offered for free makes competition extremely hard you can imagine, which is a gripe of some commercial developers.

In a recent article, John De Goes argued that "The tools market is dead. Open source killed it." Open source has cut costs exponentially for developers, however they are restricted to the licensing terms of the code, which usually keeps it free and open. With so many open source tools now available for free, it restricts commercial companies from using price as a competitive tool since the open source alternative cost zero. So to be able to charge anything for a developer tool, the product would have to be significantly better than the open source alternative. Goes says that this also has a catch to this as well. The cost to learning a new IDE is quite high for most developers, since they are already use to the workings of their current one.

But is killing the tools market really such a bad thing. The death of the tools market was brought about from the birth of the open source market, and those in the open source market would argue that the benefits outweigh the loss. With open source, sharing code has eliminated countless hours rewriting code to do the same exact thing. And though this makes it nearly impossible to charge for your software, the creation of it is significantly easier.

Ohloh is a good site to put things into perspective. On their site, they show the projected cost of the project if it was done from scratch. Right away you can see that some projects would cost millions if not for open source. Subversion, for example, is projected to cost 5.2 million if a team was to write the code themselves. With these gains in cost efficiency, I would say the death of the tools market isn't so sad.

References:
http://www.ohloh.net/projects/subversion
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/10/0228220&from=rss

-Antony Tran


Thanks for the Continued Support and Contributions
Our database is partly maintained by our team of researchers as well by the contributions that are received from the community. Here is a submission we received last week through our web interface:

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ApacheMap

Description:
The perl script parses a apache or apache2 combined access log for the IP addresses. It then looks up a Geo-Tag for those locations and if successful it adds them to a data file which the Google maps API then displays. So you get all your unique resolvable hits plotted on a map. From 0.3a onwards new style blue markers are used which contain information about the location when clicked on.


Newest Release:
apache-geo-map-0-6b.tar.gz
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We appreciate all the contributions that have been made, either through our form on our web page or by email, and we also like to hear why you are changing your project's license as in the email above. It gives us more insight into which direction license trends are moving. We will continue to post up user contributions to our blog each week, and we may quote parts of your emails. If you wish the email to remain private, just mention so and we will not disclose any part of it.

Much Appreciated,

Palamida R&D Group


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

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The GPL3 project, sponsored by Palamida, Inc (http://palamida.com ), is an effort to make reliable publicly available information regarding GPLv3 license usage and adoption in new projects. The work published on both sites listed below is licensed This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License .

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Palamida was launched in 2003 after its founders learned first-hand what happens when companies don't have full visibility into the code base of their software applications based on Open Source Software. Their experiences inspired them to create a solution to streamline the process of identifying, tracking and managing the mix of unknown and undocumented Open Source that comprises a growing percentage of today's software applications. Palamida is the industry's first application security solution targeting today's widespread use of Open Source Software. It uses component-level analysis to quickly identify and track undocumented code and associated security vulnerabilities as well as intellectual property and compliance issues and allows development organizations to cost-effectively manage and secure mission critical applications and products.

For more information about FOSS management solutions, go to http://palamida.com, or send a note to sales@palamida.com. Please mention the GPL3 site when you reach out to Palamida.