December 18, 2011 AT 10:54 am
Use of GPL and other copyleft licenses declining?
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.”
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3 Comments
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That’s a shame!!!
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.
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.