No, Black Duck, The Sky Is Not Falling

About the same time this news broke, I heard from source code analysis specialist Black Duck. They told me that, prior to the Github announcement (which they had not expected), they had analysed the projects on Github, using both their own proprietary scanning software and also inspection by their analysts. They asserted that “while 60 percent of OSS projects have a clearly declared license, 40 percent of the world’s OSS projects have no explicitly declared or identifiable license, raising questions for many”. This statistic relies heavily on their study of Github; they state that “77 percent of projects on GitHub have no declared license, compared to only seven percent of projects from all other open source forges.”