v3 Growth

GPLv3 was a major change in many respects. I discussed this back in March in my post on the third draft of GPLv3, and Black Duck’s website has information about this as well.

On August 6, I reported in a blog entry that 305 projects have adopted GPLv3 since it was announced on June 29. As of August 17, that number had swelled to 335. That’s a 10 percent increase in two weeks! Meanwhile, 24 projects have adopted LGPLv3. That makes a grand total of 359 projects adopting either license.

Between these v3 licenses, GPL is chosen 9-out-of-10 times. This is the same ratio we had with v2 licenses. We have not seen a significant exodus to other licenses, nor have we seen a significant uptick in adoption of LGPLv3, which operates the same way as LGPLv2: reciprocity/copyleft is limited to the original work itself (i.e., it doesn't extend to code that is linked to).

It seems that with v3 licensing, the more things change, the more things remain the same.