Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

GPL, Copyleft Use Declining Fast

Posted by timothy on from the taking-great-liberties dept.

itwbennett writes "Use of the GPL, LGPL, and AGPL set of licenses is declining at an accelerating rate, according to new analysis by the 451 Group's Matthew Aslett. In fact, the 451 Group projects that GPL usage will hit 50% by September 2012. Instead, developers are licensing projects under permissive licenses such as the MIT, Apache (ASL), BSD, and Ms-PL. The shift started in 2007 and has been gathering momentum ever since. Blogger Brian Proffitt posits that 'the creation of the GPLv3 and the sometimes contentious discussion that led up to it' may be partly responsible for the move away from the GPL."

5 of 808 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Fine with me, GPLv3 sucks for business by Microlith · · Score: 5, Informative

    The problem with GPLv3 is that I can't use it in an application I develop unless I release any changes/mods I make to the source code.

    That was true with the GPLv2 as well.

    That's my secret sauce. If I'm a startup and trying to form a niche in an industry, why would I want to give my recipe away?

    Boo hoo, so write it yourself. Why is it every complaint against the GPL seems to come from those who want to mooch and not contribute?

  2. Re:BSD license was always more permissive, so grea by Microlith · · Score: 5, Informative

    I can profit while using GPL code. I simply can't take and not give back.

  3. Re:BSD license was always more permissive, so grea by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 5, Informative

    In my previous job I had customers who were deathly afraid of GPL to the point where they would not allow me as their supplier to use any open source code in the products I supplied regardless of what the license was or if it saved money.

    For these people anyway GPL was a real impediment to the acceptance of open source.

  4. Re:BSD license was always more permissive, so grea by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Informative

    The problem with that claim is that it's not even remotely true. For example, consider Google. They have their own private fork of Linux (GPLv2) which includes things like their own filesystem. Some changes are contributed back to the community because maintaining them in a private fork costs more than the loss of competitive advantage from sharing them. Some are kept private, because the scales tip the other way.

    In contrast, Yahoo uses a private fork of FreeBSD on a lot of their systems. They employ several FreeBSD developers and contribute a lot of changes back if doing so won't give away a serious competitive advantage, but they keep some things private.

    One project has a permissive license, the other has a strong copyleft license, but the behaviour of downstream users is identical in both cases. The GPL doesn't stop you using, modifying, or profiting from the code without giving anything back, it only prevents you from refusing to share the source for your modifications with anyone who receives a binary.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  5. Re:BSD license was always more permissive, so grea by Pi1grim · · Score: 5, Informative

    What? How come every single time GPL comes up everyone automatically assumes that there is a clause that forbids you to profit from GPL-ed projects? I personally modified quite a number of GPL software and, sticking to the license provided the source code along with the binaries AND received a payment.
    Tell RedHat that you cannot profit from GPL software.
    And to repeat once again — BSD is about freedom of the coder, GPL is about freedom of the code.