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Surge in GPL source code releases

Wed, 2007-01-17 18:24 — Uwe Hermann

Is this just me or do we see a highly increased rate of (important and interesting) stuff being released (or announced to be released soon) under the terms of the GPL lately?

A few examples:

  • VirtualBox — a VMware-like virtualisation solution
  • Second Life — the client for now, but the server software might follow
  • Fortress — Sun's Fortran replacement
  • OpenSolaris — scheduled to be released under the GPLv3
  • Java — this might have a huge impact...
  • Sun UltraSPARC T1 — a complete, modern CPU

This is a great trend and good news for all of us. A special thanks to Sun for releasing more and more stuff under free licenses!

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Wed, 2007-01-17 23:15 — Joachim Breitner (not verified)

Unfortunately, sometimes it fails

XaraLX was also (mostly) freed a year ago, but soon the project went dormant. Just putting code under the GPL is not enough, it has to be maintained as well...

Thu, 2007-01-18 04:37 — Uwe Hermann

GPL'd code and maintainers

Yes, true. Golgotha (a 3D strategy game) was another example of released code which didn't really turn into a healthy, active project...

For most of the bigger projects out there it seems to work quite well, though...