Preamble
In February 1989, Richard Stallman first released his GNU project software for UNIX under version 1.0 of the GNU General Public License (GPL). In June of that same year, Bill Joy first released a free version of UNIX software under the University of California's Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license. These relatively quiet events signaled a new era in software licensing. Almost imperceptibly at first, but with increasing speed and energy, this licensing revolution, now widely referred to as open source, spread around the world.
By the first year of this century, approximately 17,000 open source projects were active on the SourceForge servers (www.sourceforge.org). Four years later there are over 74,000 such projects and more than ...
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