[gaxun]

I have been drafting an 'Ideas' post about the following idea, but it's not done yet and this looks like as good a place as any to look for some early feedback. This might not have as much clarity as I'd like.

The general idea is to have a site that can track various projects that release their own copy of GPL (especially, but other licenses as well) software. So Apple ships their version of {bash, etc.}, and so does your router, and someone else's refrigerator. And this site ("GPL Hub?") just links to all the places that are hosting their own version of {bash, etc.}. Maybe it could even show how they've diverged, although that might not be so easy.

Recently it has become very trendy to host all code in one centralized location like GitHub. But GitHub isn't really that great at showing you the "forks graph" anyway. Many companies that ship GPL code have archives like this available on their own websites. This could help increase visibility and give users an easier time finding the source code. I'd love to know how many copies of different GPL projects are out in the wild. Maybe for the companies that don't publicly host their GPL code, someone who makes a successful GPL request could share the code on this same site.

Those are some of the ideas, I'd still love to finish the post sometime but it's a bit too vague for me to say anything concrete yet. Any direction to related works or explanations of why this is a bad (or good) idea would be much appreciated!

[pYQAJ6Zm]

I really like the idea. Where free licenses are concerned, I believe this would help “cross-pollination” among projects and facilitate the progress of open source.

It could also work as a (perhaps curated) reference. Sort of like Rosetta Code, but for more high-level features ­– “how have projects X and Y chosen to implement this feature?”

Besides, it could serve an archival function. A quick search on the web reveals a couple of projects on this vein, but they tend to rely on storing official releases. The way I see your idea, it could be made to work in a way closer to what archive.org does for the web, archiving everything it’s permissible to, with the addition of meta information about the projects, their relationships, etc.

Not a small undertaking, but a very inspiring one!

[mlinksva]

https://www.softwareheritage.org/ launched recently to do for software something like what archive.org does for the web.

[Corrado]

That sounds like a pretty good idea. What about using this as a central place to track GPL violations? I have a feeling that there are quite a few products out there in the wild that use GPL software but don't confess to it. Maybe a site like this could persuade them to become compliant with the license.

[voltagex_]

This could be very very useful for embedded devices. You'd be better off linking to repos where possible - some vendor dumps are gigabytes in size.

Happy to chat more. Details are in profile.

[philippnagel]

Dito. My email address can be found in my profile.