[License-discuss] notes on a systematic approach to "popular" licenses

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 07:04:40PM +0000, Luis Villa wrote:
>    - Top 10 open source licenses
>    <https://www.whitesourcesoftware.com/whitesource-blog/open-source-software-licenses-trends/>
>    from WhiteSource. Top 5 are same as Black Duck, but BlackDuck has Perl at
>    #6 and ISC at #7 (despite being deprecated by ISC!) and MS-PL doesn't make
>    the top 10; WhiteSource doesn't have ISC or Perl and has MS-PL at #7.

For the records, and unless I'm missing something, this seems to be at
the same level of "scientificity" of the yearly report by Black Duck: we
don't know what's in the database of "over 3M open source components and
70M source files", we don't know what they count to produce the pie
charts (files?  "components"? popularity? etc.), nor we have access to
the code used to due the counting.

I'd be glad to be proven wrong and pointed to all the details (data,
source code, etc.) that allow to independently verify the results of
that (and/or similar) studies.

Cheers.
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli . zack at upsilon.cc . upsilon.cc/zack . . o . . . o . o
Computer Science Professor . CTO Software Heritage . . . . . o . . . o o
Former Debian Project Leader . OSI Board Director  . . . o o o . . . o .
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