We're keeping a close eye on the license shift as open source projects move toward adoption of GPL3.

Friday, July 6, 2007 was the week anniversary of the GPLv3 license release and we sent out a Watch List update:

GPLv3/LGPLv3 Conversion
A week after GPLv3 was announced , adoption rates remain modest. As of 3pm PDT, July 6, our research indicated that 116 projects officially adopted the GPL v3 license, with 3 projects adopting LGPL v3. These projects included:

GNU projects such as Bison, Core Utilities, Bayonne, etc., Non-GNU project such as LiVEs , SISU XML Copy Editor , etc., and Ruby projects such as Ruby Fast Installer, Ruby Survey Kit, TopSpot, etc. Here's the complete list.

Palamida estimates that the conversion represents less than 1% of GPL projects. Most projects that have stated their support of conversion to the GPL v3, still have licenses that read "GPL v2 or later." Our research indicated that as of Friday, July 6, 2,786 projects had licenses that currently state GPL v2 or LGPL v2.1 or later. By using the "or later" phrase, the copyright holder is effectively leaving it up to the end user to decide which version of the license they want to use.

It is Palamida's opinion that the 119 projects that have exclusively adopted GPL v3 or LGPL v3 in the first week, did so to show explicit support for the new license. Other projects, such as Samba, and many of the GNU projects, which have publicly expressed their intent to adopt are waiting until the next releases of their projects to make the move to the new license. Here's Samba's recent announcement.

-Theresa Bui Friday