
Data shows GPL is losing to permissive licenses - yodon
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/17/mit_apache_versus_gpl/
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yodon
In 2012, 60% of open source projects had copyleft (GPL-like) licenses. In 2019
copyleft was down to 33% and still falling albeit more slowly, with permissive
(MIT-like) licenses dominating the modern open source licensing landscape.

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belorn
Back then people also did a study checking the licenses in Debian and got the
opposite result.

The general conclusion back then was that large and long lived projects tend
to favor GPL, while smaller and short lived projects tend to favor permissive.
The media number of files per project on github is 1, the median number of
authors is also 1. In comparison, Debian packages has significant higher
median numbers.

So far I have seen nothing to contradict that finding.

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yodon
Only time will tell for sure. I think the shift from SourceForge+Patches to
Github+PullRequests drove significant change in the number and demographics of
developers actively committing to open source projects (that is just a belief
at this point, I haven't found hard data to confirm or deny it). Large multi-
developer projects like the ones you cite in the Debian data tend to be older
because it generally takes time for projects to mature to large developer
counts. If that's the case (and all this is very much data-poor speculation),
then you would expect larger multi-developer projects today to preferentially
exhibit the older GPL-biased license preferences in ways that an equivalent
sample in 2025 would not or would with lower strength.

