Essay RFC delayed.

[Forrest J. Cavalier III]

> It's interesting to note that there appears to be a trend of increase
> of GPL use in software announced on freshmeat.net . I suspect this trend
> has followed the commercialization of Linux, but I don't have proof yet.
> I'll ask Rob Current if he can give me the data necessary to produce a
> graphical plot.

That would be interesting for sure, but there are a
number of complications which must be dealth with.
   - freshmeat.net is a small subset of all available
     open source software.  For example, last I checked,
     that index contained a limited number of records
     for the "old standards"  normally included *BSD
     distributions, and lacked a lot of what is in the 
     comp.sources.unix archives.

   - freshmeat.net includes quite a bit of non OSD
     compliant software, which must be excluded from the
     analysis.

   - Not every record at freshmeat has a license type,
     (although most do.)

   - Freshmeat lists about 5000 items, but I think
     that is less than 25% of the total number of
     existing OSD compliant releases.

FWIW, I can provide some data on the current usage
of licenses based on the open source software database
at the Reuse RKT (http://www.mibsoftware.com/reuse/).

The 3161 utilities in the open source software database
are tagged with the following license types:
 1873 unknown oss license, but likely not GPL
 1104 GPL
   70 freely distributable
   50 known BSD style
   29 Artistic
   21 PD
    5 MIT
    5 MPL
    2 QPL
    2 AFPL


Analyzing functions and libraries in the Reuse RKT database:
 1458 unknown oss license, but likely not GPL
   27 GPL
   25 LGPL
    7 known BSD style
    5 freely distributable
    1 MIT
    1 Artistic
    1 PD

Forrest J. Cavalier III, Mib Software  Voice 570-992-8824 
The Reuse RKT: Efficient awareness for software reuse: Free WWW site
lists over 6000 of the most popular open source libraries, functions,
and applications.  http://www.mibsoftware.com/reuse/