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Licenses in the WILD
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Dan Foreman-Mackey
January 06, 2015
Programming
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Licenses in the WILD
My slides for the #aas225 panel discussion on software licensing practices.
Dan Foreman-Mackey
January 06, 2015
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Transcript
! " # $ CCPP@NYU dfm dfm.io @exoplaneteer Dan Foreman-Mackey
I don't know anything about licensing!
but...
I do know about data science!
None
None
None
None
28,569,100 largest public repo ID (as of 2014-12-28)
5,000 requests/hour rate limit
a few requests/repo required
1,578,967 repositories ("randomly" selected)
6% of the GitHubz (representative)
{ "name": "emcee", "full_name": "dfm/emcee", "language": "Python", "fork": false, "subscribers_count":
39, "forks": 117, "stargazers_count": 414, "open_issues": 35, ... } + README*, LICENSE*, COPYING* for each repository, download: in the top directory
JavaScript Ruby Java Python PHP C C++ CSS C# Objective-C
Shell Perl VimL 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 percentage of repos
63 languages more popular than IDL (only?)
1,578,967 repositories
263,288 are licensed
17% are licensed that's up from 15% in 2012! softwarefreedom.org/resources/2013/lcs-slides-aaronw
28,972 only mention the license in the README of these,
JavaScript Ruby Java Python PHP C C++ CSS C# Objective-C
Shell Perl VimL 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 percentage with a license
license popularity
MIT License GPL Apache License BSD unknown LGPL Public Domain
Eclipse Public License Creative Commons A↵ero GPL Mozilla Public License Artistic License ISC license 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 percentage of licensed repos all repositories
None
EXCITED about licensing the internet gets really
MIT License GPL Apache License BSD unknown LGPL Public Domain
Eclipse Public License Creative Commons A↵ero GPL Mozilla Public License Artistic License ISC license 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 percentage of licensed repos all repositories
MIT License GPL Apache License BSD unknown LGPL Public Domain
Eclipse Public License Creative Commons A↵ero GPL Mozilla Public License Artistic License ISC license 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 percentage of licensed repos Python
MIT License GPL Apache License BSD unknown LGPL Public Domain
Eclipse Public License Creative Commons A↵ero GPL Mozilla Public License Artistic License ISC license 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 percentage of licensed repos IDL
MIT License GPL Apache License BSD unknown LGPL Public Domain
Eclipse Public License Creative Commons A↵ero GPL Mozilla Public License Artistic License ISC license 0 10 20 30 40 50 percentage of licensed repos C
MIT License GPL Apache License BSD unknown LGPL Public Domain
Eclipse Public License Creative Commons A↵ero GPL Mozilla Public License Artistic License ISC license 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 percentage of licensed repos Fortran
MIT License GPL Apache License BSD unknown LGPL Public Domain
Eclipse Public License Creative Commons A↵ero GPL Mozilla Public License Artistic License ISC license 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 percentage of licensed repos Emacs Lisp
MIT License GPL Apache License BSD unknown LGPL Public Domain
Eclipse Public License Creative Commons A↵ero GPL Mozilla Public License Artistic License ISC license 0 10 20 30 40 50 percentage of licensed repos VimL
MIT License GPL Apache License BSD unknown LGPL Public Domain
Eclipse Public License Creative Commons A↵ero GPL Mozilla Public License Artistic License ISC license 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 percentage of licensed repos all repositories
MIT License GPL Apache License BSD unknown LGPL Public Domain
Eclipse Public License Creative Commons A↵ero GPL Mozilla Public License Artistic License ISC license 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 percentage of licensed repos JavaScript
MIT License GPL Apache License BSD unknown LGPL Public Domain
Eclipse Public License Creative Commons A↵ero GPL Mozilla Public License Artistic License ISC license 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 percentage of licensed repos Ruby
MIT License GPL Apache License BSD unknown LGPL Public Domain
Eclipse Public License Creative Commons A↵ero GPL Mozilla Public License Artistic License ISC license 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 percentage of licensed repos all repositories
MIT License GPL Apache License BSD unknown LGPL Public Domain
Eclipse Public License Creative Commons A↵ero GPL Mozilla Public License Artistic License ISC license 0 10 20 30 40 50 popularity weighted percentage all repositories (weighted by popularity)
⾠CAVEATS I only scraped GitHub
I only found top-level license files (with the right names)
⾠CAVEATS
my README parsing was pure hack! (it's called data science)
⾠CAVEATS
17% of repos are licensed and the kids are permissive
TAKE HOME Thanks to Aaron Williamson for the 2012 data!