Summary: The set of copyleft licences at above 80% in SourceForge, but inclusion of repositories like CodePlex or GitHub tilts the overall picture

OVER the past 9 years several firms such as Black Duck came out of Microsoft, liaising with Microsoft and Microsoft proxies such as CodePlex to convincingly sell the illusion (or a self-fulfilling prophecy) that GPL is dying. We have covered this for nearly 7 years and not much has changed. Professional FUD triumphs. Redmonk, which Black Duck and Microsoft had both paid, recently promoted this nonsense using invalid (biased) data. Another company which is in the licence FUD business (monetising fear of perceived issues), a firm called Protecode, continues adding to these perceived issues by releasing a report about GitHub and SourceForge. Protecode, to its credit, shows that the GPL is still dominant. As Phoronix put it the other day:

Protecode's numbers show the percentage of copyleft licenses on SourceForge to be above 80% while for GitHub the percentage was below 30%. Their results also indicate that the MIT license is the most popular on GitHub followed by the GPL. On SourceForge, however, the most common license for projects was the GPL.

GitHub is a relatively new site that is based on software from Linus Torvalds and his colleagues. There is nothing wrong with GitHub; I have two accounts there; one for work, one for personal projects. Where it fails to present a balanced view may actually be the lack of scaling based on project size, impact, etc. From what I am able to gather, GitHub is littered with lots of tiny projects, some without code, mostly Web-based code, plus branches, forks, etc. A lot of the very big projects are not hosted on GitHub and some are not at all hosted on third-party servers. They can be managed locally in businesses using git (as we do in the company my wife and I work for).

"Incidentally, based on LinkedIn, Stephen Walli seems to have left Microsoft (again)."What's worth noting is that Microsoft now approaches GitHub in the sense that it is willing to abandon Microsoft hosting for GitHub. That's quite a thing given that the maker of git it also the maker of Linux and GitHub is predominantly Free software- and GNU/Linux-based.

Incidentally, based on LinkedIn, Stephen Walli seems to have left Microsoft (again). He was a key person in CodePlex and quite a mole inside the Free software community for a long time (we have written about him for 7 years). That departure might explain why we have seen no pro-Microsoft propaganda from him as of late and it may even be part of a broader exodus, including this news that may show CodePlex dying:

Microsoft hosts CodePlex as an open-source project hosting service where generally the Microsoft OSS projects call home, but it seems some of their own employees aren't too happy with it and see a brighter future with GitHub.

Do any of our readers know more about the demise of CodePlex? Can it be put in numbers? ⬆