The latest Black Duck Software figures on open source license popularity make it clear.
(The little black duck shown is copyrighted, trademarked, and has always been protected by Warner Bros., part of the Time-Warner media empire. He’s 72 but carries his age well. And Wikipedia knows his middle name.)
Microsoft licenses are now used on 1 in every 40 open source projects. That’s more than Mozilla. More than Eclipse. More than even the Lesser GPL.
Of course in the greater scheme of things 1 in 40 isn’t all that many. Nearly half of all open source projects are still licensed under the GPL v.2. Microsoft’s open source license market share is still less than half that of GPL v.3. (That’s why the cartoon duck is here rather than Black Duck’s little quacker. Think of GPL v.2 as being Bugs Bunny.)
But we’re talking about growing from a standing start. I’m impressed.
Much credit needs to go here to CodePlex, the Microsoft-sponsored open source site whose Foundation is headed by former Microsoft executive Sam Ramji.
NOTE: Ramji runs the Codeplex Foundation at codeplex.org, which is separate from Microsoft. The main Codeplex site is at codeplex.com.
In our recent interview, Ramji held out the possibility that the Microsoft licenses, and process, could tease a lot more code out of corporate repositories outside the software industry.
So there is room for growth there.
The Black Duck report also indicates there is room for growth in GPL v.3. There are now over 10,000 projects on GPL v.3, with many projects on Sourceforge continuing to switch over.
It’s this competition, between the Microsoft licenses and GPL v.3, that I will enjoy tracking most over the next year. What will you be looking at?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a journalist, writer and part-time futurist for over 30 years.
