Eran Strod's blog

I noticed in the first week of August, the GPL version 2 open source license dropped below the 50% share mark for the first time since we started tracking this data in 2007. Up until this point, a majority of open source projects were using the GPLv2 license, but GPLv2 share has eroded pretty steadily over the last year+. In July 2008, GPLv2 was used by 57.7% of all projects. Today it stands 8% lower at under 49.6% (which means roughly 100,000 projects). During the same period, LPGL 2.1 is down about 1% and GPLv3 is up 3.4%.

That is not to say that the GPL is going away. GPL version 2 is still by far the most widely used open source license. At over 49% of all OS projects, it is used by four times more projects than the number two license which is the LGPL version 2.1 (9.5%). Collectively the GPL family of licenses accounts for more than 65% of all open source projects in the Black Duck KnowledgeBase.

I just complete an analysis of 779 open source projects in the health care segment.  Ten years ago, when the American Association of Family Physicians attempted to organize an open source EMR (electronic medical records) project, it never quite achieved the necessary momentum.  Out of all the open source projects in the health care space, there were only 62 project releases in the year 2001.  The open source community has come a long way since then – there were 565 releases in 2008.  There are about 30 projects dealing specifically with EMR/EHR and some of them are very large – having 100+ contributors.

For more info, please see the press release: http://www.blackducksoftware.com/news/releases/2009-06-10

Here’s the podcast: http://ducks.blackducksoftware.com/~webmedia/_Podcasts/BDS_Eran_Strod_6_...

While attending SD West in Santa Clara last week, Black Duck Software conducted a random survey of 50 developers attending the conference. We’ve all heard about developers using more open source today than ever before, but Black Duck wanted to get some feedback straight from developers themselves, so we put together some questions, circulated through the conference and started gathering responses. Before I get into the results, I first want to thank on the behalf of Black Duck all of the developers who took time out of their days to participate. Now, let’s get to the top level findings: