The GNU General Public Licence is falling in popularity, looking at all the versions of the GPL as a whole, according to figures released on Tuesday by Black Duck. At the same time, Microsoft's open source software license, MS-PL, is gaining ground in the open source world, the company said. Black Duck, which provides services and products for developers working with open source code, compiled the figures from its database of more than 200,000 open source projects collected from the internet.
[The lead is a tad misleading. GPL has lost some percentage but it lost to BSD and MIT, not to MS-PL - Sander]
Fedora 9 has updated xorg-x11-xfs (race condition).
Fedora 10 has updated xorg-x11-xfs (race condition).
Red Hat Enterprise Linux has updated pidgin (denial of service) and openswan (input validation flaws).
Ubuntu has updated kernel (multiple vulnerabilities).
Matt Asay makes a great point.
When you are using a cloud software licenses don’t matter much. (Picture from NASA via Visible Earth.)
This has always been true, of course. Ever since the Web was spun, users of Web services have remained blissfully ignorant of disputes over software licenses. Licenses, we don’t need no steenkin’ licenses.
What is changing today is simply the balance of where client computing takes place. Power and responsibility are moving to what used to be called the server side.
Things I used to do on my PC, like get my mail and manage my calendar, are now done online. What matters is no longer who controls my software but who controls my data.
To Matt, this becomes a question of “data-driven lock-in,” with Google becoming Microsoft due to its “control” of my data.
But do they really control my mail? That’s not the deal implicit in the transaction. Just as with Google Health, I own my mail and my list of appointments.
What Google owns is not the data, but data about the data. They know I’m on those pages, and they have the right to sell ads against those page views. They can aggregate data about my use of the resource, both to manage it and to sell billboards alongside it.
You can argue it’s better than the deal you get here. When you post a TalkBack, that legally becomes the property of ZDNet.
This is not because ZDNet is greedier than Google. It’s convenience. Managing hundreds of licenses to the hundreds of comments on my controversial Steve Jobs post would drive everyone crazy. But it’s easy, once you aggregate all your mail in your inbox, to give you control.
What we’re entering, in license terms, is not a cloud era but a fog era. Clouds and fog are the same thing. The difference between them is in the eye of the beholder. If you can see clearly licenses and their terms are in the far distance. If you can’t, then you need a legal guide.
In the latest Black Duck analysis of open source licensing trends, it appears on the surface that the GPL has lost significant market share.
That is, until you look inside the numbers.
Versions of the GPL are currently being used by 65% of all projects, down from about 70% a year ago, with V3 licensing now on track to become the fourth most-widely used license by the end of the year.
The only non-GPL licenses to attract significant usage are the Artistic License and the standard BSD. But the GPV v3 should, at its present rate of growth, pass the latter in share within six months, the report says. Over half of all projects are still licensed under GPL v2.
The Artistic License, originally credited to Larry Wall, is the only open source license to have gone through a successful court challenge, specifically that of Jacobsen v. Katzer, where a district court is still considering an SFLC request for injunctive relief.
The best-known project under the Artistic License is Perl, but that project is dual-licensed under the GPL. There are also multiple versions of the Artistic License — Version 1.0, Version 2.0, and clarified. The Black Duck project did not break them out.
Black Duck’s analysis of its own figures, however, is that “open core” licensing is on the rise and that open source licensing is becoming more diverse, less “restrictive.”
So is the GPL losing its grip as the dominant open source license? I don’t think so but I can be persuaded.