In Jack Wallen’s recent blog posting, “The Tivoization-less GPL” he mentions that the GPL3 license entered the world without a whimper. This really depends on your definition of whimper, and whether or not you’re taking into account the over 2,000 open source projects that have indicated their intent to move with the next version of their software. While it's true that there was not a flood of projects jumping over to GPL3 during it's first week in the wild, Palamida noted that 116 had moved over as of Friday, and had done so as a show of support for the license. Doing a quick query against our gpl3.palamida.com database, our research indicates that there are at least 460 projects we are tracking who explicitly licensed under GPL v2 (without the “or later” clause).

It's important to note that Palamida’s GPL3 database is a subset of open source projects that we include in our compliance library, which already tips the scales at over 3 Terabytes. The compliance library offers information on much more than just GPL3 data.

It’s been surprising to see the large number of direct submissions we have been getting from the community who want to be sure we are tracking their specific GPL status, hence the new section in Search that allows users to submit a project we may have missed. Users can also submit edits to the project data directly if they feel there is an error or an addendum needed. Our team has reacted quickly to ongoing feedback and continues to make changes that add value for all users.

To sum it up, given that the license is just over a week old, it's a bit early to make predictions on what the end-results will look like. We didn't expect to see massive adoption at the onset and we aren't expecting an exodus in the future. What we do expect, and what is evident by the numbers, is that a steady trickle of converts to the new license will continue, and many will remain "neutral" until they find a compelling reason to make the jump.
-Melisa LaBancz-Bleasdale