While surfing the Black Duck Software website, I came across a very useful page worth bookmarking:
Top 20 Most Commonly Used Licenses in Open Source Projects
Black Duck's site says that they update the data in the table below on a daily basis, so please click over to their website for the latest data:
There is nothing unexpected or overly shocking in the data. For example, I have known that GPL 2.0 is the dominant open source license. I always thought the Apache 2.0 license was a little more prevalent, but the data is not far off from what I expected. GPL 3.0 appears to be doing really well since it is already above the Apache 2.0 and Mozilla Public License.Anyhow, I figured I'd share the link. I'll certainly visit it periodically to stay abreast of the open source license landscape.
3 comments:
Shaun,
Do you know by any chance if they have a way to provide the same listing "by language" i.e. what this listing would be for C/C++ vs. Java vs. etc.? I've tried to find it but couldn't. I would be interesting to see how much "the Linux community" (however it could be defined) is "bending" those stats vs. the other FOSS communities.
Cheers,
sacha
Sacha,
I don't have the language count handy for all OSS, but I do for the new projects released in 2008, which would be a leading indicator of where things are going.
We counted over 17,000 new OSS projects in 2008 – those projects that show a creation or registration date in 2008. 47% of these newly created projects used the C language. Java came in as the number two language of choice at nearly 28%. Third was Javascript at over 20%. In the world of scripting, nearly 18% of the projects chose to use Perl while only 11% used PHP. These were both higher than Python at nearly 10% and Ruby at 6%. Note, most projects used more than one language and these results are based on the number of projects using a given language, not the number of lines of code created.
Hope this helps. Also we conducted a survey this week at SD West and asked developers what their primary language/environment was (not specific to OSS). The results are at:
http://www.blackducksoftware.com/news/releases/2009-03-11
Peter Vescuso
Thanks Peter, that's very interesting. Now, do you have the next level of information i.e. for the Java projects, what is the license ranking? And same for C/C++?
My bottom line is this I guess: it would be very interesting to track the license ranking PER programming language AND OVER TIME, to see how license adoption in a specific "technosystem" evolves.
But maybe it is just me who is interested in that kind of things :)
Cheers,
sacha
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