GPL Project Watch List for Week of 07/25

The GPL v3 Watch List is intended to give you a snapshot of the GPLv3/LGPLv3 adoption for July 11th through July 18th, 2008.

This Week:

• Week Summary
• New Projects
• Software 101: Open Source vs. Free Software Movement
• User Contributions

Back on Track
Over the past few weeks we were backed up in our GPL3 numbers due to some maintenance issues on the Sourceforge website. We have spent this past week catching up and with the hard work of the team we have almost caught up on our data.
This week our GPL v3 count is at 2846 GPL v3 projects, and increase of 38 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 5 projects bringing it to 130 AGPL v3 projects. The LGPL v3 number is at 273 LGPL v3 projects, up 1 project from last week.



New project conversions this week include:

• JabberCommander: JabberCommander is a tool made in Java that makes a connection between the computer and a Jabber Client (eg. Google Talk) allowing the user to send order to the computer: launch programs and scripts, retrieve the output of certain commands (ls,ps,dir...)


• SocialDNS: SocialDNS is a novel naming infrastructure for locating information in the World Wide Web. It is an open network of Web servers that maintain and resolve domain names under a new URL scheme (go://).


• Cadmium: Cadmium is a Java port of the Objective Caml virtual machine. It is part of the OCaml-Java project.

Software 101: Open Source vs. Free Software Movement
While both the Open Source software as well as the Free Software Movement has been in existence for quite some time now, some of you may be wondering, what's the difference? Don't both ideas basically proclaim free software for all? While some may see both ideas basically reach the same conclusion of free software for everyone, philosophically the ideas are very different. This was most evident in our conversation with Richard Stallman. He is quick to point out the differences when he stated, "You've described the activity using the ideas associated with the term "open source". The free software movement's goal is not even included in that description."

So then, what is the difference between open source and free software? The Free Software Movement started in 1983 as a social movement proclaiming that software should be free for all and that proprietary software is ethically and morally wrong. The social issues behind the free software movement made some uncomfortable leading to the founding of the Open Source Software movement in 1998, which viewed the availability of free software and open source code as a development methodology, focusing the practical applications of free software rather than the social and political aspects. On the GNU website, the Free Software Movement briefly explains the difference,

"The fundamental difference between the two movements is in their values, their ways of looking at the world. For the Open Source movement, the issue of whether software should be open source is a practical question, not an ethical one. As one person put it, "Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement." For the Open Source movement, non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the Free Software movement, non-free software is a social problem and free software is the solution."

While both movements have been in existence for some time now, what of the future of these movements and their affect on the software market? We see that the availability of source code as a development model definitely has upside, but what of the social aspects? With proprietary software so deeply entrenched in the mainstream market, will the increasing influence of open source software also strengthen the Free Software Movement? These are some of the questions that we hope will be answered in the near future. If you have any comments please feel free to respond. Thank you.

-Edwin Pahk
References:
http://gpl3.blogspot.com/2008/06/gplv3-one-year-anniversary-edition.html
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html


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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Muldis Rosetta

Description:
The Muldis Rosetta DBMS framework is a powerful but elegant system, which makes it easy to create and use relational databases in a very reliable, portable, and efficient way. This "Rosetta" file provides a 10,000 mile view of the Muldis Rosetta framework as a whole, and the detail documentation for each component is included with that component. The distribution containing this "Rosetta" file is the Muldis Rosetta core distribution.

Newest Release:
Muldis-Rosetta-0.7.0
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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.

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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.

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The Research Group (rdgroup@airius.com)

Ernest Park
Antony Tran
Edwin Pahk
Kevin Howard