Most Projects On GitHub Aren't Open Source Licensed

PCM2 writes "Kids these days just don't care about open source. That's the conclusion of the Software Freedom Law Center's Aaron Williamson, who analyzed some 1.7 million projects on GitHub and found that only about 15% of them had a clearly identifiable license in their top-level directories. And of the projects that did have licenses, the vast majority preferred permissive licenses such as the MIT, BSD, or Apache licenses, rather than the GPL. Has the younger generation given up on ideas like copyleft and Free Software? And if so, what can be done about it?" Not having an identifiable license is one thing, but it seems quite a stretch to say that choosing a permissive open source license is "not caring"; horses for courses.

Comments

Re:Open Source License

[Microlith]

They've just noticed that licenses like BSD is better open source license than GPL.

I love it when people take subjective opinion and present it as if it were fact. Going BSD does mean you give up on copyleft.

BSD license is truly in the spirit of freedom. Anyone, either open or closed source projects, can use BSD licensed code.

It depends on your goals. GPL is very clear in its intent to keep the sources of the software it covers open, and that necessarily excludes closed source projects.

real software projects?

[ssam]

I am sure most of those 1.7 million projects have no aspiration to become a real software project. do they have a website, mailing list/forum, releases, users? or are they just random little scripts, snippits and exercises, just put on line for the education of others?

For a large piece of coding i might care about getting bug fixes back. for the script i use to sort my digital photos in to folders based on the date in their exif, and is 50% lines pasted from documentation or stack exchange, i don't care. if you want to know which licences are used for serious projects then grab the top hundred or thousand from ohloh and check them.

Re:It's a matter of trust

[phantomfive]

It's a matter of trust - I trust that generally others will do the right thing, and good changes will come back.

This is optimistic, like the tragedy of the commons. It's also worth mentioning that there are several times in history when companies used open source code, and wouldn't have given back if it weren't for the GPL requiring it. For example, that is why GCC includes Objective-C support. NeXT wouldn't have given that back at all if they weren't required.

Microsoft released it's Hyper-V code due to the GPL. They wouldn't have if the kernel had been BSD licensed. Many mobile companies only release the modifications to Android that are required under the GPL. If it weren't for the GPL, they likely wouldn't release the drivers either, and projects like CyanogenMod would be a lot harder. There's a long list of source code that we have because of the GPL.