[License-discuss] popularity, usage, re-review of old licenses [was Re: Evolving the License Review process for OSI

[Philippe Ombredanne]

Hi Luis!

On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 1:14 AM Luis Villa <luis at lu.is> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 3:50 PM Pamela Chestek <pamela at chesteklegal.com> wrote:
>> Is there any way to find out if some of these licenses are even still in use (or ever were)?
>> http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
>
> One could probably do a pretty decent survey with some combination of libraries.io,
> clearlydefined.io, and Debian/Fedora (for C/C++, which aren't covered well by
> libraries.io or AFAIK clearlydefined.io). Daniel German or Philippe Ombredanne
> would probably be able to suggest appropriate queries/databases.
>
> There's a bunch of problems with using this data for relative popularity
>  (some discussion of this waaaayyyy back in the archives, between Daniel
> and I) but for basic "is it used by any modern-ish software at all" those could
> give you a pretty good start.

Thank you for the plug for https://clearlydefined.io !

For those who did not hear about this, ClearlyDefined is a project
that incubates at the OSI. So that would be quite a natural source of
licensing data. There are about 20 million versions of open source
packages that have been scanned with scancode-toolkit there and this
contains all OSI-approved licenses and many more.
This is of course a biased subset and yes, it may not cover everything
out there yet. But this is likely the biggest and most comprehensive
license-related data set available today.

--
Cordially
Philippe Ombredanne