According to an article which we somehow overlooked, IBM, Red Hat, Novell, and MySQL can be listed among all those large companies that welcome GPLv3. Google is another. The article reminds us just how popular GPLv2 already is.

The GPL is the most widely used license in the open-source realm. More than 30,000 projects, which is about 66 percent of the open-source projects tracked by the Freshmeat site, use the GPL.

Palamida's report/tracker suggests that the number of projects which now use GPLv3 has jumped from 15 to over 90. This happened within just a couple of days, so uncertainty does not seem like a great factor anymore. At this stage, over 5,000 more projects already express their intent to embrace the new software licence.

GPLv3 has many consequences, both negative and positive, depending on your stance, your goals, and your interests. Shutting Microsoft out (or limiting its ability to abuse and misuse) is one of the side effects of wide GPLv3 adoption. There is an interesting new blog item where a bizarre (and nonetheless reasonable) arguments are being made. Among the suggestions made to Microsoft, there exists another scary claim that Microsoft needs Linux in order to merely survive in the future (think Wine and Free Software). This is something which we discussed a few times in the past.