License distribution
I decided to take a look at how much different free software licenses are used. After looking at various analyses made by other people earlier, I made my own based on Sourceforge and Freshmeat. The result:
| Sourceforge | Freshmeat | |
|---|---|---|
| GPL | 69.23% | 67.94% |
| LGPL | 11.17% | 5.95% |
| BSD-like | 7.16% | 5.46% |
I found earlier results from January 2001, April 2002, May 2002, September 2002 & November 2003 and March 2004. When compared with them, it seems that use of GPL has decreased by 3-4% while LGPL and BSD have increased a bit, but it might also be that with this sample we really cannot know if this is really the case. This comparison needs to be done again in a couple of years. Anyway, here’s the table for Sourceforge:
| Jan 2001 | April 2002 | May 2002 | Nov 2003 | March 2004 | March 2005 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPL | 73,09% | 73,00% | 72,00% | 71,00% | 71,14% | 69,23% |
| LGPL | 9,86% | 10,00% | 10,00% | 10,00% | 10,82% | 11,17% |
| BSD | 5,65% | 7,00% | 7,00% | 7,00% | 7,13% | 7,16% |
| Number of projects | 9077 | 23651 | 39000 | 45736 | 50332 | 61348 |
You can also download the OpenOffice file, which has more details.
Howison
and Crowston warn about dangers of using Sourceforge for
analyses like this, but I don’t think their warnings apply when just
looking at the licenses.
Update April 7, 2005: Added the number of projects in the table.
Very good idea! It would be interesting to see how much 100% is for every sample. Maybe GPL has lost 3%, but the number of applications has more than doubled.
I added a line for total number of projects in the table. Any interesting conclusions?
No conclusions ;-), but some comments:
The pace of new projects seems to be almost linear (I suppose it should be May 2003 not May 2002), around 10,000 projects per year.
I would even say that the current period is not the most fruitful in that sense. This is probably due to other SF-like systems as Savannah, BerliOS and so on.
Maybe many GNU GPL applications that may had started in SF have finally chosen Savannah, although I haven’t found stats about licenses there. I see that the proportion of GPL in the 1,700+ BerliOS projects is around 68%.
It really is May 2002. See above for sources.
I wrote a script to get some more data from the Sourceforge site so we can see what happens when we only look at stable/mature projects. I’m downloading at the moment, I hope SF is okay with that…
Actually, I noticed SF software map has filters that can be used to obtain this information. I’ll post it later.
Niklas, have also a look at the data provided by the OSSMole project. They spider SourceForge periodically and offer publicly the data.