[plug] [OT] After Year 12

[Cameron Patrick]

On Wed, Aug 04, 2004 at 12:08:38PM +0800, James Devenish wrote:

> ?! Who is this "everyone else" of whom you speak? I suppose your
> statement is fair because the GPL seems hugely popular.

Yes, that's precisely what I meant by "pretty much everyone else".

> I got the figure from the output of the following presumptuous
> script:
> for i in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright; do echo $i ${$(grep -l GPL $i):+GPL}; done

Yikes, that made my zsh segfault.  <upgrades to latest unstable version>

I got 75% on one machine I tried that on, 64% on another, 76% on yet
another, 62% on a fourth, and so on.  (The two with higher proportions
are desktop machines, the two with lower proportions are servers.)
I'd say that the GPL is almost certainly the single most popular free
software licence -- and having a "market share" of somewhere between
half and three quarters of the installed software is quite an
achievement, certainly not something that I'd describe as "only".

I'd be curious to see what the the results were like if you weighted
them by popcon results, but not curious enough to actually script it
myself.

Cameron.