No, Black Duck, The Sky Is Not Falling

Headlines telling you 60% of open source and 77% of Github projects are dangerous need careful reading (and a pinch of salt).

Earlier this week, Github announced that they were finally taking steps to ensure their users selected an open source license for repositories created on the service. Their offering is promising; an additional step in the process to create a new repository prompts for selection of an open source license, and for those needing help making a license selection they have made a new web micro-site called ChooseALicense.com which offers simple (if sketchy and perhaps slightly partisan) license analysis. There's a full discussion in my other column.

They have more to come; they have staff working on a tool to add licenses to existing projects, and both tools are themselves hosted on Github and accepting pull requests from all comers. Anything you don't like, you can help fix.  All very pleasing and a welcome change from the answers I was getting when I wrote the article that exposed the problem.