Aslett: The trend towards permissive licensing
This last chart illustrates something significant about the previous dominance of strong copyleft licenses: that it was achieved and maintained to a significant degree due to the vendor-led open source projects, rather than community-led projects. One of the main findings of our Control and Community report was the ongoing shift away from projects controlled by a single vendor and back toward community and collaboration. While some might expect that to mean increased adoption of strong copyleft licenses - given that they are associated with collaborative development projects such as GNU and the Linux kernel - the charts above indicate a shift towards non copyleft."
Posted Jun 6, 2011 16:47 UTC (Mon)
by bkuhn (subscriber, #58642)
[Link] (3 responses)
Please note that despite many inquiries that Ive made to Black Duck, they absolutely refuse to publish their methodology and mechanisms for producing these “findings”. This isnt a scientific study, its just Black Duck marketing materials. The material should be therefore ignored by serious researchers in my opinion. Ill note that Googles similar analysis, which actually is more favorable for GPL, suffers from similar problems unfortunately. AFAICT, FLOSS Mole is the only project attempting to generate this kind of data and analysis thereof in a scientifically verifiable way.
Posted Jun 6, 2011 17:08 UTC (Mon)
by smaffulli (subscriber, #75110)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jun 6, 2011 20:38 UTC (Mon)
by nicooo (guest, #69134)
[Link] (1 responses)
I'm not a DBA, but calling this a single database sounds like cheating.
Posted Jun 7, 2011 10:06 UTC (Tue)
by angdraug (subscriber, #7487)
[Link]
Posted Jun 6, 2011 19:51 UTC (Mon)
by jthill (subscriber, #56558)
[Link] (1 responses)
GPLv2 usage is growing steadily. I'd like 5.5% growth on my money, please. GPL overall usage is up 29%. Those are their figures, straight from their article, and they call that a "decline".
Open source is extending its grip on segments of the software market. GPL'd projects aren't multiplying as fast as the OSS base overall. That's the way the water's sloshing at the moment. The author agrees their connotations are overblown (
Posted Jun 9, 2011 12:16 UTC (Thu)
by mdz@debian.org (guest, #14112)
[Link]
Posted Jun 6, 2011 20:15 UTC (Mon)
by elanthis (guest, #6227)
[Link] (7 responses)
Posted Jun 6, 2011 20:58 UTC (Mon)
by smaffulli (subscriber, #75110)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jun 7, 2011 6:56 UTC (Tue)
by nlucas (guest, #33793)
[Link]
[1] http://forums.libsdl.org/viewtopic.php?t=7148
Posted Jun 6, 2011 23:45 UTC (Mon)
by xtifr (guest, #143)
[Link] (4 responses)
As for the embedded world, I'll just point out that if you can't update it, you can't provide bug/security fixes, and if you can, then in most cases, you'll be able to comply with the LGPL. The exception may be for no-dynamic-linking platforms, but I expect those to become increasingly rare. (I'm deliberately ignoring DRM systems here.)
I suspect that what we're seeing (if anything) is more of a backlash against the GPLv3, combined with a (probably justifiable) loss of memory about the bad old days when restrictable licenses like BSD led to an explosion of subtly incompatible systems.
* by "restrictable", I mean licenses that allow adding new restrictions on derivative works. You can call it "permissive" if you like, but since the only significant extra permission such licenses grant is the right to add restrictions, I think restrictable works.
Posted Jun 7, 2011 9:05 UTC (Tue)
by elanthis (guest, #6227)
[Link] (3 responses)
In some cases. In many cases I've personally been involved with (yes, personal anecdotes don't mean squat, I know) companies just don't want to get involved with the relatively complex and still murky GPL waters. Oddly, these same companies often have no problem drafting their own crazy licenses. Lawyers making busy work to get themselves paid more, possibly. Dunno.
> As for the embedded world, I'll just point out that if you can't update it, you can't provide bug/security fixes, and if you can, then in most cases, you'll be able to comply with the LGPL.
I don't think so. Many/most of these platforms only allow statically-linked code, or code for which the only dynamic libraries are platform-supplied libraries. To use an LGPL'd library, it must be statically linked with the program, which basically means the library might as well be GPL'd for our purposes.
Even assuming that we're willing to do that, remember that getting new versions of the apps out to users for bugfixes/updates goes through a centralized provider. The popular example here is Apple and iOS, although all of the game consoles (or the ones that allow updates, anyway) have the exact same restrictions. I can't ship an Xbox360 game with the ability for the recipients of my distribution to swap out any LGPL'd compiled code with their own versions and hence I cannot ship LGPL'd code for the Xbox360 platform at all.
Between that, iOS, and the other similar platforms it pretty much means that every non-PC-exclusive game is essentially banned from ever using LGPL code (much less GPL code), and platform exclusive games are getting fewer and farther between.
Posted Jun 8, 2011 10:29 UTC (Wed)
by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063)
[Link] (2 responses)
It is required that the user be able to "modify the Library and then relink to produce a modified executable", but under LGPLv2.1 it's not necessary for them to be able to run their modified executable on any specific hardware.
Posted Jun 9, 2011 14:39 UTC (Thu)
by cortana (subscriber, #24596)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jun 10, 2011 23:41 UTC (Fri)
by elanthis (guest, #6227)
[Link]
Posted Jun 7, 2011 2:01 UTC (Tue)
by Hausvib6 (guest, #70606)
[Link]
Posted Jun 7, 2011 7:17 UTC (Tue)
by cannedfish (guest, #49561)
[Link]
Posted Jun 8, 2011 12:07 UTC (Wed)
by justincormack (subscriber, #70439)
[Link]
Posted Jun 9, 2011 16:43 UTC (Thu)
by b7j0c (guest, #27559)
[Link]
Black Duck has not done science here; it's just marketing & PR
Black Duck has not done science here; it's just marketing & PR
Black Duck has not done science here; it's just marketing & PR
Black Duck has not done science here; it's just marketing & PR
Aslett: The trend towards permissive licensing
Hi Jack, Yes, good point, what were seeing is probably more of a re-balancing
) — no surprise in a blog post, really.
Aslett: The trend towards permissive licensing
Aslett: The trend towards permissive licensing
I have the same feeling (as I mentioned here), although without evidence it's difficult to discuss these things.
Aslett: The trend towards permissive licensing
Aslett: The trend towards permissive licensing
It's only for the not-released yet 1.3 version, and the site was not updated, but iOS and other restrictive systems used in the gaming industry played a big role on the why [1].
Aslett: The trend towards permissive licensing
my initial $0.02 are that this is due to either the increasing presence of corporate powers in the open source world
I would expect the corporate powers to favor copyleft for their own code, since bug fixes and enhancements are more likely to come back to them that way. It's only for other people's code that they'd prefer a more restrictable* license, but they're not usually going to have much say over how other people license their code (with rare exceptions like IBM's successful attempt to get Oracle to relicense OOo).
Aslett: The trend towards permissive licensing
Aslett: The trend towards permissive licensing
"To use an LGPL'd library, it must be statically linked with the program, which basically means the library might as well be GPL'd for our purposes."
Why do you say that? The LGPL (v2.1) only requires that you provide the source of the library, along with your own object code. You have no obligation to provide your own source code.Aslett: The trend towards permissive licensing
Aslett: The trend towards permissive licensing
Aslett: The trend towards permissive licensing
Aslett: The trend towards permissive licensing
scripting languages...
KISS
