Use of GPL and other copyleft licenses declining?

Gplusage

GPL, copyleft use declining faster than ever – ITworld.

“Looking at the graph to which Aslett refers, you can see how that projection is a logical one to make. You can also see what developers are licensing their projects under instead: permissive licenses such as the MIT, Apache (ASL), BSD, and Ms-PL group of licenses.”

“The analysis indicated that the previous dominance of strong copyleft licenses was achieved and maintained to a significant degree due to vendor-led open source projects, and that the ongoing shift away from projects controlled by a single vendor toward community projects was in part driving a shift towards more permissive non-copyleft licenses.”


Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!

Join us every Wednesday night at 8pm ET for Ask an Engineer!

Join over 38,000+ makers on Adafruit’s Discord channels and be part of the community! http://adafru.it/discord

CircuitPython – The easiest way to program microcontrollers – CircuitPython.org


New Products – Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! — New Products 11/15/2024 Featuring Adafruit bq25185 USB / DC / Solar Charger with 3.3V Buck Board! (Video)

Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: A New Arduino MicroPython Package Manager, How-Tos and Much More! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi

EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey

Adafruit IoT Monthly — The 2024 Recap Issue!

Maker Business – Adafruit Daily — Apple to build another chip at TSMC Arizona

Electronics – Adafruit Daily — SMT Tip – Stop moving around!

Get the only spam-free daily newsletter about wearables, running a "maker business", electronic tips and more! Subscribe at AdafruitDaily.com !


3 Comments

  1. That’s a shame!!!

  2. I don’t consider it to be a shame. For some projects, copyleft makes sense. For other projects copyleft doesn’t make sense.

    I would argue that having both types of licencing be fairly common is for the best. I suspect that if only one type or the other were culturally accepted, fewer open source project would get started.

    Also, I suspect part of the reason for many people preferring the permissive licences, is that most of them are much simpler licences. Often people really just want to get their work out there and will pick whatever licence seems reasonable to them and doesn’t take much of their time to read the details of.

    If one desires for greater prevalence of copyleft in new projects, I think simpler copyleft licences would be needed.

  3. I have participated in some open source projects and written couple of libraries myself. I always choose permissive license such as MIT or BSD. Personally I never use GPL licensed code in my projects. Reason is simple, GPL is viral.

    This also goes for bug reports and patches. I rarely contribute anything back to GPL projects. For permissive licensed projects I try to contribute back if my skills allow it.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.