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Ben Ramsey:
Post-Open Source
Apr 27, 2016 @ 18:52:01

Ben Ramsey has posted some interesting thoughts in his latest post wondering if we're working in a post-open source world. The main idea here is that, based on some recent statistics, the number of projects defining licenses is smaller than expected.

I’m a tad late to this discussion, but I think it’s still pertinent today—perhaps even more so—and Jordi Boggiano’s recent post, “Common files in PHP packages,” got me thinking about the lack of open source licenses in public repositories. In his post, Jordi explains how he analyzed all packages at Packagist, specifically for the sake of identifying common file names developers are using for their change logs. As part of that analysis, he was also able to tell how many projects have a license file.

[...] In a 2013 analysis of software licenses on Github, Aaron Williamson, then Senior Staff Counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center, found that 14.9% of repositories had a top-level license file, while 3.7% only announce the license in the project’s README.

He links to other posts and Tweets suggesting that there's more of a rejection of licenses in recent development trends. He wonders if this is a result of a "open source losing its soul" as more companies enter the space with their licensed code.

tagged: post,opensource,opinion,license

Link: https://benramsey.com/blog/2016/04/post-open-source/


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