1. License proliferation
An extremely naive quantitative analysis
based on FLOSSMOLE data
April 4th, 2013
Walter van Holst
w.van.holst@mitopics.nl
Independent IT consultancy through its combination of technical, business and legal expertise
3. License proliferation
In 2009 Mitopics sponsored a Master’s thesis on
license proliferation
Qualitative analysis
Contradictory results
Time for a quantitative follow-up
Little data available in 2009
5. License proliferation measurements
What is license proliferation?
The distribution of licenses across licenses?
Or just a compatibility problem?
And is one-way compatibility enough?
6. How do we value compatibility
Extremely naively:
Treat open source projects as nodes of a network
Consider any combination as a desirable one
Treat any combination as of equal value as
others
Metcalfe’s law: n*(n-1)/2
8. Methodology
FLOSSmole contains a wealth of data
However…
… quite a lot of pollution
So far the Freecode (formerly Freshmeat) code
set is most useful, but only after 2009
17. Some cautious conclusions
Fragmentation was not a big problem to begin
with
Grew with the rift within the GPL-communities
May be subsiding again, thanks to adoption of
APL2 and GPL2+