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Open Source Project Licenses Trending Toward Open Rather than Free

Posted by timothy on from the for-some-values-of-open-or-free dept.

bonch writes "An analysis of software licenses shows usage of GPL and other copyleft licenses declining at an accelerating rate. In their place, developers are choosing permissive licenses such as BSD, MIT, and ASL. One theory for the decline is that GPL usage was primarily driven by vendor-led projects, and with the shift to community-led projects, permissive licenses are becoming more common."

2 of 369 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Misleading headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Perhaps you've missed the "free as in free speech, not as in free beer" train. You should look into OSI vs FSF. It would spare the moderators to do some research before posting.

    GPL is viral so it will always tend to spread unless people duplicate the projects with other license terms. And with so much money in the corporate world, I guess that's what's happening - new [duplicating] projects adopting more convenient terms for making profit. Still, I'm happier this way than having to put up with binaries.

  2. Re:Depends where you look by The+Second+Horseman · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Apple is pretty hostile towards GPLv3. They won't distribute any code licensed under it. That's almost certainly why they stuck with an older version of Samba in OS X until they could replace it with their own implementation. Pretty much, once something goes GPLv3, they're going to fork & maintain, or rewrite from scratch.