GPL Project Watch List for Week of 02/29

The GPL v3 Watch List is intended to give you a snapshot of the GPLv3/LGPLv3 adoption for February 23rd through February 29th, 2008.

February 29th - Leap Ahead
Today, on this wonderful leap year, we have hit another milestone. Combining the GPL v3 and LGPL v3 numbers, the new versions of the licenses have now accumulated over 2000 projects that have adopted the license. The current GPL v3 count is at 1841 GPL v3 projects, an increase of 58 GPL v3 projects and the LGPL v3 count is up 3 LGPL v3 projects, bringing it to 176 LGPL v3 projects. Combined they account for 2017 projects that are either GPL v3 or LGPL v3. Up to this point we still have not seen any slow down in project adoption. Many new projects are choosing the GPL v3 or LGPL v3 to be their license for their infant projects, possibly due to the fact it is the newest version of the largest license in the open source community, regardless of the details of the terms. Our next milestone will be 2000 projects that are just GPL v3. We will report that milestone when we hit it, which is expected in the next month.





















New project conversions this week include:

• OpenSnake: OpenSnake is an open source snake game (a clone of the classic snake game). The snake of it is continuous. The GUI of it is implemented using wxWidgets.
• Subspace II: An Open Source 3D based successor to the game SubSpace and the current client Continuum.
• xOperator: It tries to be a semantic agent for xmpp / jabber network which finds and shares content about resources (using RDF/SPARQL) for you and your jabber friends.

Story of the week
Public Domain
In a recent article on CNET News, they brought up a licensing question that I had myself, "Is public domain software open- source?" The blogger, Stephen Shankland, interviewed various lawyers and not surprisingly they had mixed answers. A few of the lawyers said that, yes it does fit into the definition of open-source while other lawyers such as Mark Radcliffe said public domain software cannot "impose the terms necessary to comply with any of the open source licenses". By the very definition, public domain requires no license, so it cannot be a part of the OSI which regulates open-source licenses. But the confusion is easy to fall into because if public domain software offers source code, it fits the definition of open-source.

The importance of this article is it is crucial for those who would like to contribute to the open-source community to understand what it truly means to be open-source. I have run into various projects that consider themselves free and in the public domain, but do not offer the code required to be open-source. They do not follow the terms set out by the OSI and their licenses, which can cause problems if their work actually does end up in another project. Just posting code onto a server is not enough to contribute to a world governed by laws. It is important for developers to take legal responsibility for their work and choose a suitable license. However, I may be preaching to the choir, since those of you who actually care enough to track GPL v3 numbers are most likely knowledgeable of open-source licenses anyways.

References
http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9881858-39.html?tag=newsmap

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.

Publication
If you have a need for licensing statistics related to free and open source software, please contact us with details at rdgroup@airius.com.

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.

GPL Project Watch List for Week of 02/15

The GPL v3 Watch List is intended to give you a snapshot of the GPLv3/LGPLv3 adoption for February 9th through February 15th, 2008.

February 15th - Happy Belated Valentines Day
As of February 15th, our GPL v3 database contains 1740 GPL v3 projects, which is an increase of 66 GPL v3 projects, above our expected 50 new projects a week. The LGPL v3 database now contains 154 LGPL v3 projects, up 3 projects from last week. And Lastly our GPL v2 or later list is at 6439. For those of you who are keeping close count, you will notice that there are times when our GPL v2 or later count decreases. This is primarily due to existing projects switching to the GPL v3 license.





















New project conversions this week include:

• DeborphanGUI: DeborphanGUI provides GUI to debian console tool deborphan. It provides some information about all listed packages. I'ts written in Python & wxWidgets.
• CHeMS: CHeMS is the first Content Helper Management System (CHMS) in the world.
• GRchart: GRchart is an easy-to-use financial charts plotting widget written using ruby-gnome2 and rcairo.

Story of the week
Future of OSS
In a recent Gartner article, the company highlighted its predictions of the IT world in the immediate future, approximately 5 years from now. Two of their predictions that related to OSS were "By 2012, 80 per cent of all commercial software will include elements of open-source technology" and "By 2012, at least one-third of business application software spending will be as service subscription instead of as product license." If these predictions materialize, developers will have to prepare themselves for the repercussions of these changes and what it means to their projects.

Over the next five years it will be critical for both commercial and open source developers to be aware of the license terms that govern the code that goes into their end products. This is necessary to protect the integrity of the software produced in addition to preserving rights granted by particular software licenses. The continuing adoption and popularity of the SaaS model will increase the ease of software deployment, as well as potentially expand the reach and impact of OSS licenses, such as the Affero General Public License, which extends the rights and responsibilities of the GNU GPL license to users who use an application over a network instead of a local installation. Knowledge by IT managers and the education of end users will continue to be of paramount importance to a comprehensive software audit, management and deployment strategy in any organization.

References
http://gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=593207

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

GPL Project Watch List for Week of 02/08

The GPL v3 Watch List is intended to give you a snapshot of the GPLv3/LGPLv3 adoption for February 2nd through February 8th, 2008.

February 8th - Happy Chinese New Year
For everyone on the other side of the world or anyone who would like to celebrate this week, we wish you a Happy New Year! This week on our GPL v3 database, another 50 new GPL v3 projects have been added, bringing our total to 1674 GPL v3 projects. The LGPL v3 is going slowly with only 1 new project this week making the current count 151 LGPL v3 projects. Lastly the GPL v2 or later number is at 6442 projects.






















New project conversions this week include:

• JDEEP Eclipse Plugin: a tool for developers to monitor coding time. The purpose of this plugin is to help the developers to evaluate their productivity in software implementation.
• Penacho: Penacho calculates and draws the gas dispersion of a smokestack in the atmosphere.
• Night Light IRC Proxy: Night Light IRC Proxy (Bouncer) is a multi-user IRC proxy written in C for UNIX

Story of the week Linux a Go for Green
About half a year ago, Linux announce that they would be going green, implementing changes to manage their power consumption. They would rearrange their infrastructure in such things as their server racks and reduce CPU usage in the kernel to reduce their the amount of energy being used. Now, the changes have been made and the new power schemes are good to go.

Torvald admitted that "the operating system was lagging behind on power-management and energy-diagnosis tools". But these new changes will bring Linux up to speed. "New versions of the operating system are being endowed with a "tickless" kernel that forsakes traditional computer time-keeping in an effort to keep the processor in a somnolent, low-power state." By lowering the CPU's energy consumption, this should make the OS more competitive as a laptop OS by extending the battery life.

In terms of licensing, the green movement should not affect their licensing terms, since many of the changes are infrastructure. However, if Linux really wanted to push the green movement, they could include green licensing terms with the kernel to spread the environmental awareness. This is unlikely though since imposing such a regulation, would be in a sense, counter to the open source movement. Regardless, Linux's efforts to reduce power usage is significant since the "tickless" kernel will lower the consumption of everyone using it. The tech industry is already a "greener" industry than others since they use efficient automations, but it is nice to see further efforts being made to maximize power efficiency.

References
http://www.news.com/Torvalds-Linux-ready-to-go-green/2100-7344_3-6228517.html
http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2007/06/19/linux-goes-green
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=672
http://www.news.com/Linux-coders-tackle-power-efficiency/2100-1007_3-6192865.html?tag=st.nl


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.

GPL Project Watch List for Week of 02/01

The GPL v3 Watch List is intended to give you a snapshot of the GPLv3/LGPLv3 adoption for January 26th through February 1st, 2007.

February 1st - Black History Month
As of February 1st our GPL v3 database now contains 1624 GPL v3 projects, as compared to last weeks figure of 1579 GPL v3 projects. The LGPL v3 count remains the same at 150 LGPL v3 projects and the GPL v2 or later number is at 6444 GPL v2 or later projects. We are coming close to the next milestone number of 2000 GPL v3 projects, which should occur within the next two months as long as the adoption rate does not diminish.






















New project conversions this week include:

• Sipo Domain Management System: manage your domains and list order by dates so that you will never forget to renewal the domain.
• jMmsLib: Java library for encoding/decoding MMS messages. Also provides a simlpe client for sending MMS through a WAP gateway.
• astahttpd: a Web server for Linux written in pure PHP, mainly targeted for PHP developers. It supports GET, POST, and HEAD request methods, alias directories, CGI script processing, and both IP and name based virtual hosts.

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.