OStatic

It's been about 10 months since the Free Software Foundation released the final draft of the third version of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3), the license that is used by the vast majority of free software projects. The question since then has been -- will the community get behind the new license, or will they continue to use the GPLv2?

The answer seems to be a little of both. Palamida has been tracking GPLv3 adoption, and has a snapshot of GPLv3 adoption through March 28, 2008. Palamida has tallied 2,042 GPLv3 projects and 179 LGPLv3 projects.

I was unaware of Palamida's tracker until I caught a link to it over on Matt Asay's blog. It's quite a nice tool, and very handy to have a convenient counter to watch how the community and companies are reacting to the new license. (Yes, it's still "new" after 10 months, given that the GPLv2 has been in use since 1991...)

What's really interesting is being able to dig down and see precisely which projects have switched -- though Palamida doesn't display the projects being tracked that haven't switched from the GPLv2.

So far, there's not been an overwhelming shift to the new license -- which isn't surprising -- but a gradual adoption of the GPLv3 by existing projects and use of the GPLv3 by a number of new projects. For most projects, there's not much of a compelling reason to switch, since most developers and projects that utilize the GPLv2 for their software seemed to be happy with the license in the first place.

It's also not surprising that the LGPL'ed total is smaller -- a far smaller percentage of free software projects need to use the LGPL.

Palamida also shows 6,446 applications that are licensed under the GPLv2, so the GPLv2 is still going to be with us for a very, very long time. That's particularly true with projects like the Linux kernel, where the main developers see little advantage to changing and the actual process of changing the license would be onerous even if there was a motivation towards doing so.

To get around the difficulty of getting permission to change the license from each copyright holder in a project is to adopt the "any later version" clause -- or require each developer to assign copyright to the project. The GNU Projects use the "or later" language, and also asks for copyright assignment from contributors. As you might expect, the GNU Project has been relicensing its software under the GPLv3, which also gives the GPLv3 numbers a boost.

I'll be interested in seeing where the numbers are come the first anniversary of the license. I'll be very surprised if GPLv3 uptake passes GPLv2 before the second anniversary of the license, if then.

Note: For those who don't follow free software licensing particularly closely, the "L" in LGPL stands for "lesser," though it originally stood for "library." (The name change reflects a general disapproval, but grudging acceptance, of the necessity of having proprietary programs linking to free software.) The LGPL is essentially the same as the GPL, but allows programs that do not derive from the original LGPL'ed work to link to or be compiled with the LGPL'ed code regardless of the license. That's not an option for pure GPL'ed code.

Do you think the open source community will strongly back the new license in coming months, or continue to use the GPLv2?

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier works for Novell as the openSUSE Community Manager.

• GPLv3