Black Duck Software recently published some summary statistics about free and open source software license adoption, based on data it collected by crawling the web. The report lists “top 20 licenses that are used in open source projects” and the proportion of projects which use each license, as well as historical figures purportedly representing the number of projects using and planning to use GPLv3 variants for each month of the last two years. Because of inherent difficulties in collecting this kind of data, and because Black Duck’s own methods are opaque and unverifiable, the report is largely meaningless.

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