It's been over a month now since the GPLv3 has been released and though adoption rates have never hit firestorm status, we've continued to watch the fire smolder. As of Friday, Palamida's GPL3 update site had tracked over 250 projects as having made the switch loud and clear with nearly 3,000 projects remaining a bit ambiguous with a "GPL2 or later" license clause. Taken together, it's not an insignificant number of projects for a relatively short amount of time.
What's been the most interesting to watch as a neutral observer have been the passionate dramas being played out on both sides of the fence. A visit to Slashdot any day of the week yields endless entertainment in the form of very heated and sometimes downright surly commentary. I recall a couple of weeks ago that one excitable poster wrote that the GPL3 license was a vehicle of "pure evil". In my humble opinion, there are many things in today's world that seem much more evil than GPL3 but then again, I'm admittedly dispassionate about it either way. Opinions are just that.
The Telenovella type exchanges between the FSF and Linus Torvalds have also provided hours of insight into what is likely the most passionate argument either side has had about open source since the dawn of open source. Again, this is just me speaking as a relative newcomer to the GPL3 argument. In a July 16 blog entry, Paul McDougall covers the continuing demise of the already tepid relations. For someone like myself, coming from the high drama, sometimes morbid world of computer security, I did not anticipate the depth of the philosophical debates raging all over the Internet at any given time. It's fantastic to be involved in a community that has so much to say and has clearly put so much thought into this issue.
Two things that Palamida has observed is that the SugarCRM move seemed to surprise a great many in the open source community. Those that had followed Sugar's deep involvement in the whole GPL3 draft process likely deduced that they were working to become more comfortable with the license terms - a sort of foreshadowing to an eventual adoption. Secondly, the fact that the Linux kernel remains on GPL2 is proving to be a slightly harrowing challenge for the entire embedded market. As Linux-based projects fork, which they will of course as evolution of open source continues, everyone from toy manufacturers (robots, software controlled toys), television manufacturers, cell phone producers, and the list goes on, will be scanning their code for possible license infringement risk. It's a Pandora's Box for an entirely new segment of the open source world as they jump into the pool with those organizations already struggling with license ambiguities.
It seems there's never been a more interesting time for open source and I'm certainly glad I'm here to watch.
--Melisa LaBancz-Bleasdale
