turingMachine

During the last three years I have been attending the European Legal Network Free Software Legal and Licensing Workshop. Because of the quality of people in attendance this is probably the best workshop/conference for open source licensing in the world.

This year I presented a talk called Toward a census of free and open source software licenses.

Ever since I started working with open source licenses I have been looking into the issues of what licenses are more widely used.

The objective of this talk is to describe that a census is not trivial. There are many factors that can affect the final result. For this reason it is very important to be very aware of the methodology behind the census. Otherwise one might be misled by the results.

Michael Kerrisk from LWN was in attendance. As it is customary in this workshop, its discussion is subject to Chatham House Rule. In a nutshell, after the meeting you can mention what was discussed, but not who discussed it.

For that reason Michael requested my permission to write an article at LWN on my talk. He did a great job. It is almost a play-by-play of the presentation:

Only a word of advice: the numbers are preliminary. We’ll publish accurate in the very short future.

–dmg