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Open Source Project Licenses Trending Toward Open Rather than Free
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."
Surprise, surprise, yet another anti-GPL study from Black Duck software.
It's also a misleading summary and article.
The proportion of open source projects using the GPL, LGPL and AGPL is declining, not the absolute number of projects.
*GPL may not actually be in decline at all, the article doesn't say, it just says that it's falling as a proportion. This information is pretty worthless on its own.
If you look at the work that Apple supports (clang, etc.), they are using non-GPL licenses. Same goes for code on CodePlex (the Microsoft site for C#/.NET open source projects). If you look at any of the ruby, python, javascript projects on GitHub, they tend to use a non-GPL license.
C/C++ projects make up 11% of the projects on github and these tend to be the languages that use GPL.
I personally use GPL for my projects because I am happy with that license, and use other projects that are GPL. Others may not, so they are free to choose a different language.
And we have heard repeatedly from Brian Proffitt that the GPL is dying/dead, but is still being used for new projects. Oh and this is article dated December 16, 2011, so why is this news now?
Welcome to the FUD machine.
MS-PL? Who on earth has ever heard of that license? Perhaps the fact that the only source of the data is a company that is connected to Microsoft has something to do with its mention? The fact that the same company has been emitting anti-GPL propaganda since 2008 is also interesting.
Slashdot, please don't propagate astroturfing.
Even by the FSF's definition, "copyleft" and "free" are distinct terms. Every license in the summary is considered free by the FSF: BSD MIT ASL
If you're speaking "technically", you're wrong. If I release a project under GPL, I can release it under any other license I like later.
The only time I am tied to GPL is if I choose to incorporate someone else's work into my project, and they don't want to change licenses.
So on a big project with lots of copyright holders, it is nearly impossible to switch to a more permissive license, but that's because it's so hard to get a big group of people to agree, not because the GPL doesn't allow it.
From TFA:
That was the conclusion of Matthew Aslett's analysis of recent data from Black Duck Software
Do we even need to say anything else?
http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Black_Duck
The proportion of GPL is "declining" fast -- from 71% in 2005 to 93% in 2011 (source). That's if you disregard fart apps and look only at software good enough for someone to package it for Debian. This does discriminate against some Mac/iOS-only stuff, but not by much as anything useful enough and freely licensed will probably have someone port it.
Also, this is the same Apple shill posting the very same data on Slashdot for the third time.
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