Data shows GPL is losing to permissive licenses

theregister.co.uk

5 pointsyodon3 comments

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.

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.

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.

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