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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. Term clarification, please by Reality+Master+301 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Free as in beer, or open as in... beer?

  2. Re:Depends where you look by gnasher719 · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

    I wonder which side the hostility comes from.