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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."

3 of 808 comments (clear)

  1. MS-PL by markkezner · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I see that the Microsoft Public License is grouped in with the other permissive ones like Apache and BSD. Honest question though, is the MS-PL actually a popular choice for non-Microsoft projects? I've never really seen it much, and my intuition says that a decent set of open source devs would be allergic to a Microsoft license.

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

    And even that is not wholly correct. Perhaps this works best:

    I can profit while using GPL software. I simply cannot close the source code as a means of forcing my customers into a dependency on me. Which is why the GPL was created in the first place.

  3. Re:BSD license was always more permissive, so grea by InsightIn140Bytes · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So what are you exactly against? People using your code and improving it without giving anything back? Because that is what Google is doing. Why are you exactly against distributing modified code without source, but not against locking in that code in their own datacenters and never giving anything back? Because the end result is the same - they use the code without contributing back. In fact it's even worser, because it also locks users to their services.

    I have a good example of this. I've been using Cryptoheaven as my email provider for several years. They open source their client, but not their server side code. This means you cannot actually use the code without also using them, and I've been locked to paying them because I was stupid enough to use their domains for emails while registering to all kinds of services.