The GPL v3 Watch List is intended to give you a snapshot of the GPLv3/LGPLv3 adoption for August 29th through September 12th, 2008.
This Week:
After over a year of tracking GPL3 adoption, we would like to announce that 3000 projects have adopted version 3 of the GNU GPL License. The strong adoption rate represented by this milestone shows the continued acceptance of this license by the Open Source and Free Software communities. We'd like to thank everyone that has been involved with this project. Without your hard work, none of this would've been possible.
This Week:
- Week Summary
- New Projects
- FOSS issues and the 2008 U.S. Presidential Race
- User Contributions
After over a year of tracking GPL3 adoption, we would like to announce that 3000 projects have adopted version 3 of the GNU GPL License. The strong adoption rate represented by this milestone shows the continued acceptance of this license by the Open Source and Free Software communities. We'd like to thank everyone that has been involved with this project. Without your hard work, none of this would've been possible.
This week our GPL v3 count is at 3000 GPL v3 projects, an increase of 69 GPL v3 projects. The AGPL v3 count is at 130 AGPL v3 projects. The LGPL v3 number is at 286 LGPL v3 projects, an increase of 13 LGPL v3 projects.
New project conversions this week include:
FOSS issues and the 2008 U.S. Presidential Race
There are many important issues in this presidential race. This is not a politically oriented blog, so we take no position and will leave the heated discussions for others, but we are interested in technology and software, so seeing as how technology is an "issue" in this political race, we thought we'd attempt to summarize where the candidates appear to stand on various technology issues related to software and code.
Neither candidate specifically mentions open source on his web page, but several prominent technology-related issues are common to both that can have an impact on software: Net neutrality, intellectual property protection and open standards with respect to online access to government services.
Net Neutrality
This issue deals with equal access to the Internet (no restrictions on types of devices or platforms) and equal opportunity to utilize the Internet once accessed. The availability of these two types of equality and openness provided by the original architecture the Internet is the primary reason so much innovation has occurred in technology and software over the last 30 to 40 years. Imagine if new, innovative devices had to be "approved" before being able to access the Internet, or if two software developers in a garage somewhere had a small web site that could never be found on the net because "prioritized" traffic bought by large media or existing commercial software companies drowns out the smaller players.
Both candidates appear to promote the idea of net neutrality, but take different approaches. John McCain does not support prescriptive regulation that would require net neutrality, preferring to allow a more "open marketplace" environment to provide a variety of choices to consumers. Barack Obama supports some type of legislation to protect the concepts embodied by net neutrality, namely to prevent network access providers from discriminating against those who won't or can't pay for "premium" access.
Intellectual Property Protection
This type of protection was originally intended to promote innovation and protect inventors and creators. It seems that more and more, our intellectual property laws are being used by content owners offensively to restrict others instead of to promote innovation and creative uses of existing ideas. However, some form of intellectual property protection is necessary to allow inventors and creators to profit from their work, so this is a delicate balance that must be managed.
Both candidates state they want to protect the IP rights of inventors and creators, both domestically and internationally. Both appear to recognize the balance between the extremes of content protection and the promotion of innovation, and that may be the extent of what we will hear about this issue.
Open Access to Government Services
This issue is pretty straightforward, but its implementation could say a lot about the attitude of each candidate toward technology. Most every government agency now has a web site that provides information to anyone who visits. Both candidates support this, and support expanding this type of access and increasing the participation of the citizenry in the process of government through increased access to broadband services.
Barack Obama's web site mentions the phrase "universally accessible formats" when it describes making government data available online. This is a critically important phrase, and is how open source can tie into this, as well as other technology issues. A "universally accessible format" is not necessarily an "open source" one, but by definition, open source formats should be universally accessible. The advantage of the open source philosophy here is that anyone can see the parameters and requirements of a particular format, and the particular format itself does not need to be tied to any particular entity, company or developer. A "format" that is "closed source" and proprietary is not available for scrutiny, customization or interpretation, and may be available only to developers within a single entity or company.
When handling the data of a government entity that will presumably continue operating for many generations to come, the ideal way to provide such data is in a format that is open and available to everyone. This includes backwards compatibility for older formats. Proprietary closed formats created by one entity or company create a disadvantage for those wishing to read data in a particular format that was discontinued years ago when the company that created the format went out of business.
Conclusion
While technology is one of the issues on the table for both candidates, other bigger issues will likely overshadow it this election. However, keep the ideas of equal access, the balancing of protection and innovation, and open standards in mind in the coming months when evaluating your candidate.
-Kevin Howard
References:
http://www.barackobama.com/issues/technology/
http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues/cbcd3a48- 4b0e-4864-8be1-d04561c132ea. htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9864581-38.html
************************************************************ ****************
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.
Link Partners
If you are willing to copy and tranlate the content weekly, please let me know - you will receive the content as soon as it is available, and you site will be listed as a translation. I can send you a bit of tracking code so that you get credit for your contribution to the readership of this site
Post your link on the bottom of the blog page.
Send me a note at rdgroup@airius.com that you are using some or all of the content
I will make sure that we host links to your sites, and we will be able to use your content within this site as well.
************************************************************
Notable Mention
The Research Group 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 over 100 core contributors who have devoted their time and resources at helping us provide up-to-date information.
************************************************************
Subscription
For more information, go to http://gpl3.blogspot.com/.
To stop receiving these weekly mailings, please send a message to rdgroup@palamida.com with the subject "unsubscribe:gpl3".
To start receiving these weekly mailings, please send a message to rdgroup@palamida.com with the subject "subscribe:gpl3".
************************************************************
Our Sponsor, Palamida, Inc.
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 opinions expressed within the GPL3 Information Blog are exlusively those of Ernest Park, the subjects interviewed and the contributing authors, and are not intended to reflect the positions of Palamida, Inc and its employees.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License .
************************************************************
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.
The Research Group (rdgroup@airius.com)
Ernest Park
Edwin Pahk
Kevin Howard
- MLE - Mobile Learning Engine: MLE - The Mobile Learning Engine is a learning application for mobile phones written in Java (J2ME). It enables you to use your phone at anytime and at anyplace for computer-aided, multimedia-based learning. It is a content independent engine.
- DataSync Suite: DataSync Suite is an open source platform for integrating tools like Zimbra, SugarCRM, Joomla, and KnowledgeTree. The tool is focused on a single sign-on, application data integration, and fast, flexible deployment.
- EPG Record: This is a perl-gtk application to get a channel list from a dvb card, display it, and allow complex filtering of view. It also has extensive multi-channel recording capabilities based on the EPG display shown
FOSS issues and the 2008 U.S. Presidential Race
There are many important issues in this presidential race. This is not a politically oriented blog, so we take no position and will leave the heated discussions for others, but we are interested in technology and software, so seeing as how technology is an "issue" in this political race, we thought we'd attempt to summarize where the candidates appear to stand on various technology issues related to software and code.
Neither candidate specifically mentions open source on his web page, but several prominent technology-related issues are common to both that can have an impact on software: Net neutrality, intellectual property protection and open standards with respect to online access to government services.
Net Neutrality
This issue deals with equal access to the Internet (no restrictions on types of devices or platforms) and equal opportunity to utilize the Internet once accessed. The availability of these two types of equality and openness provided by the original architecture the Internet is the primary reason so much innovation has occurred in technology and software over the last 30 to 40 years. Imagine if new, innovative devices had to be "approved" before being able to access the Internet, or if two software developers in a garage somewhere had a small web site that could never be found on the net because "prioritized" traffic bought by large media or existing commercial software companies drowns out the smaller players.
Both candidates appear to promote the idea of net neutrality, but take different approaches. John McCain does not support prescriptive regulation that would require net neutrality, preferring to allow a more "open marketplace" environment to provide a variety of choices to consumers. Barack Obama supports some type of legislation to protect the concepts embodied by net neutrality, namely to prevent network access providers from discriminating against those who won't or can't pay for "premium" access.
Intellectual Property Protection
This type of protection was originally intended to promote innovation and protect inventors and creators. It seems that more and more, our intellectual property laws are being used by content owners offensively to restrict others instead of to promote innovation and creative uses of existing ideas. However, some form of intellectual property protection is necessary to allow inventors and creators to profit from their work, so this is a delicate balance that must be managed.
Both candidates state they want to protect the IP rights of inventors and creators, both domestically and internationally. Both appear to recognize the balance between the extremes of content protection and the promotion of innovation, and that may be the extent of what we will hear about this issue.
Open Access to Government Services
This issue is pretty straightforward, but its implementation could say a lot about the attitude of each candidate toward technology. Most every government agency now has a web site that provides information to anyone who visits. Both candidates support this, and support expanding this type of access and increasing the participation of the citizenry in the process of government through increased access to broadband services.
Barack Obama's web site mentions the phrase "universally accessible formats" when it describes making government data available online. This is a critically important phrase, and is how open source can tie into this, as well as other technology issues. A "universally accessible format" is not necessarily an "open source" one, but by definition, open source formats should be universally accessible. The advantage of the open source philosophy here is that anyone can see the parameters and requirements of a particular format, and the particular format itself does not need to be tied to any particular entity, company or developer. A "format" that is "closed source" and proprietary is not available for scrutiny, customization or interpretation, and may be available only to developers within a single entity or company.
When handling the data of a government entity that will presumably continue operating for many generations to come, the ideal way to provide such data is in a format that is open and available to everyone. This includes backwards compatibility for older formats. Proprietary closed formats created by one entity or company create a disadvantage for those wishing to read data in a particular format that was discontinued years ago when the company that created the format went out of business.
Conclusion
While technology is one of the issues on the table for both candidates, other bigger issues will likely overshadow it this election. However, keep the ideas of equal access, the balancing of protection and innovation, and open standards in mind in the coming months when evaluating your candidate.
-Kevin Howard
References:
http://www.barackobama.com/
http://www.johnmccain.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-
******************************
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.
Link Partners
If you are willing to copy and tranlate the content weekly, please let me know - you will receive the content as soon as it is available, and you site will be listed as a translation. I can send you a bit of tracking code so that you get credit for your contribution to the readership of this site
Post your link on the bottom of the blog page.
Send me a note at rdgroup@airius.com that you are using some or all of the content
I will make sure that we host links to your sites, and we will be able to use your content within this site as well.
******************************
Notable Mention
The Research Group 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 over 100 core contributors who have devoted their time and resources at helping us provide up-to-date information.
******************************
Subscription
For more information, go to http://gpl3.blogspot.com/.
To stop receiving these weekly mailings, please send a message to rdgroup@palamida.com with the subject "unsubscribe:gpl3".
To start receiving these weekly mailings, please send a message to rdgroup@palamida.com with the subject "subscribe:gpl3".
******************************
Our Sponsor, Palamida, Inc.
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 opinions expressed within the GPL3 Information Blog are exlusively those of Ernest Park, the subjects interviewed and the contributing authors, and are not intended to reflect the positions of Palamida, Inc and its employees.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-
******************************
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.
The Research Group (rdgroup@airius.com)
Ernest Park
Edwin Pahk
Kevin Howard
Google Homepage
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