The supposed decline of copyleft

Posted Aug 23, 2017 20:05 UTC (Wed) by jzb (editor, #7867)
Parent article: The supposed decline of copyleft

What would be interesting, to me at least, would be to look at "important" projects across the board. Getting agreement on "important" could be difficult, but from my vantage point that would be things like Kubernetes, TensorFlow, Hyperledger, Node.js, Vault, cri-o, Ansible, Helm, Brew, OpenWhisk, React, Wayland, Puppeteer, the Linux kernel, and a bunch of others - not just any random thing that's thrown onto GitHub regardless of how many users or contributors it has.

I certainly don't see a lot of businesses, which are driving much of open source development at this point, embracing copyleft for new things. (Sadly.)

The supposed decline of copyleft

Posted Aug 23, 2017 21:21 UTC (Wed) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (3 responses)

The single project in your list I agree is "important" is the Linux kernel. I don't even know what most of the rest of those are. So that approach is going to run into problems really quickly.

FWIW (not much), here's my shot at such a list: Linux kernel, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Android Open Source Project, LibreOffice, TeXLive, GCC, LLVM, Python, Ruby, Perl, OpenJDK, VirtualBox, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, VLC, Handbrake, mpv, Eclipse

The supposed decline of copyleft

Posted Aug 25, 2017 6:03 UTC (Fri) by smckay (guest, #103253) [Link] (2 responses)

Union everybody's "important" set and what you'll end up with is everything available in .deb, I suspect. Do .debs carry license metadata?

The supposed decline of copyleft

Posted Sep 4, 2017 10:21 UTC (Mon) by codehelp (guest, #57016) [Link] (1 responses)

> Union everybody's "important" set and what you'll end up with is everything available in .deb, I suspect.
> Do .debs carry license metadata?

No, the binary .deb does not, it's in the related source package (as listed in the .dsc). Random .debs outside the Debian archive are not going to have the scrutiny of license metadata which underpins the numbers, so those should be excluded. Thereby, you end up with the union of the "important" set and the set of reliable data approximating a subset of the current Debian main archive.

The supposed decline of copyleft

Posted Sep 4, 2017 10:26 UTC (Mon) by codehelp (guest, #57016) [Link]

> No, the binary .deb does not, it's in the related source package (as listed in the .dsc). Random .debs outside the > Debian archive are not going to have the scrutiny of license metadata which underpins the numbers, so those > should be excluded.

Bah, need to clarify that. Many .debs in Debian will contain a copyright file in /usr/share/doc/<package-name> but some of those can be symlinks, or provided by a related package, so scanning the .debs isn't trivial. Third party .debs from outside the Debian archive are unlikely to bother at all. The point I should have made is that it is much more useful to scan the source code of the archive than to scan the binaries that get installed.