A new survey shows that “OPEN SAUCE developers are staying away from the latest GPLv3 licence in droves.” Well, sort of. The survey says that six percent of developers are using the license now, which actually seems like a reasonable number given that the license was released less than three months ago. More ominously for the FSF, almost half of the developers surveyed do not plan to ever adopt the license.
However, it seems to me like the press release omits some important information. For one thing, apparently “The Apache Foundation was identified as the organization having the best Open Source offerings.” The Apache Foundation, remember, uses a BSD-style license that allows code to be incorporated into proprietary software. In other words, it isn’t a
That suggests that a significant number of the open source developers being interviewed are not users of copyleft-style licenses in the first place. That they’re not planning to adopt GPLv3 is no more remarkable than if they’d conducted a survey that included a lot of Microsoft employees and discovered low enthusiasm for the GPL.
The important question is how many developers currently developing GPLv2 software are planning to switch to v3. The organization doesn’t appear to have released any detail about how their developer were chosen, so there’s really no way to tell the answer to that question from the information they’ve released.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.