GPL, Copyleft On the Rise

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."

Comments

Perhaps, but...

[fyngyrz]

The GPL poisons commercial code -- intentionally -- and that keeps GPL'd software from ever bringing mainstream software developers into the fold. 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. Well, that and the hugely fragmented nature of the various linux distributions. And the lack of a standard, royalty-free and non-poisonous-license GUI (other than x, but x... ugh)

I'm very happy with linux as a server platform, with pretty much all that implies, and I often write freeware for it (non-GPL, of course) but I'd never attempt to put commercial software out under it. IMHO, the GPL was the very worst thing that ever happened to linux -- it isolated and emasculated the platform in one easy step.

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