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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."

3 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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  2. 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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  3. 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.