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GPL, Copyleft On the Rise

Posted by Soulskill on from the GOP-hoping-it-can-beat-romney dept.

paxcoder writes "Contrary to earlier analyses that predicted a decline of copyleft software share to as little as 50% this year, John Sullivan, the executive director of the Free Software Foundation, claims the opposite has happened: In his talk at FOSDEM 2012 titled 'Is Copyleft Being Framed?,' Sullivan presented evidence (PDF) of a consistent increase of usage of copyleft licenses in relation to the usage of permissive licenses in free software projects over the past few years. Using publicly available package information provided by the Debian project, his study showed that the number of packages using the GPL family in that distribution this year reached a share of 93% of all packages with (L)GPLv3 usage rising 400% between the last two Debian versions."

8 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. Cherrypicking sources by Barbara,+not+Barbie · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The earlier study looked at a much broader base of projects, not just cherry-picking by limiting itself to packages in a distro.

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    1. Re:Cherrypicking sources by KiloByte · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Or rather, it's cherry-picking by quality. Any useful project that is not fundamentally restricted to Mac or Windows will most likely be ported by someone, and packaged for Debian. Fart apps, not so much.

      It's also interesting how fast non-GPL licenses decline. We're talking about falling by a factor of 4.2 in less than seven years.

      --
      The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
  2. Re:Makes sense by oiron · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The way I'd do it is, GPL for applications, BSD/MIT/LGPL for libraries, depending on the level of participation, the commercial and legal aspects, etc. And all university research should always be permissive, so that it can be incorporated into either GPLed, proprietary or whatever else.

    Isn't it easy enough to see that all the licenses solve different problems? Some are good to bring a piece of research out into the open, and some are great for protecting freedoms... No point mixing the use cases...

  3. I think the FSF might be a bit biased by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think the FSF might be a bit biased. Don't you.

  4. Applications vs. Core Libraries and Services by msobkow · · Score: 4, Insightful

    While non-copyleft licenses like the Mozilla, Apache, and LGPLv3 are quite popular for core services and libraries, most applications I've used over the years were copyleft/GPL type licenses.

    If you're building a core service, you want it used by as many people and projects as possible. But if you're developing a tool, utility, or application, often your concern is more to prevent any one company or individual from seizing that work and selling it as their own product.

    Personally I use both LGPLv3 and GPLv3 licenses as a result, because the goals of the different software components are not the same.

    --
    I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
  5. Re:Pro-GPL study from authors of GPL ... by rtfa-troll · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You left out the part where the pro-GPL study comes from the authors and advocates of the GPL.

    Thanks for the hint (its astounding the way that accusations from shills so often point you in the direction of what they themselves are doing). You left out the fact that the original data came from a Microsoft partner involved in Codeplex. Immediately I saw your post I thought to search for that.

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  6. Re:The sad part. by maxwell+demon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The only freedom the GPL restricts is your freedom to restrict the freedom of others.

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    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  7. Re:Perhaps, but... by Microlith · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ooh look, a liar.

    The GPL poisons commercial code -- intentionally -- and that keeps GPL'd software from ever bringing mainstream software developers into the fold.

    Good way to completely incorrectly representing how the GPL works.

    This is why the "year of the linux desktop" never comes. Those big packages everyone wants, from Photoshop to Office etc., the companies that create them simply can't afford to mix in with that kind of licensing.

    Bullshit, plain and simple. There are LOTS of non-GPL packages, proprietary packages even, that run on Linux.

    Ok, I know, here comes the mod-bombing, lol. :)

    And for so blatantly lying and deliberately misrepresenting the GPL you deserve it.