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Comment by vablings | Hacker News Reader

It is probably fair that a huge share of code that is Foss is licensed under GPL, much larger than the share of source available proprietary licensed code

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Here's github statistics from 2015 https://github.blog/open-source/open-source-license-usage-on...

MIT is used by more projects than GPL.

That's the wrong metric, however. Thousands of small pet repos are unlikely to have more code than a single Chromium repo (mostly LGPL), Linux, Qt, etc.

There is a lot of code on the internet that isn't accompanied by a FOSS license or any license that permits reuse, or any license at all.

Is GPL a larger share of source out there than BSD, MIT, ISC, CC, BSL, Apache, and source available combined? Enough bigger that it is repeatedly mentioned as a singular issue without so much as the words “or other licenses”?

I would have assumed the opposite is true. Do you have any data to back that up?

You would assume that there is more proprietary code available to read on the internet than GPL code? Do you have any rationale for that assumption?

Basically all GPL code is available on the web and there is a vast amount of it. I barely see any current non-FOSS code on the internet, although I think it would be fair to count the big projects who have been using pseudo-OSS licenses lately as proprietary. Wouldn't a safer assumption be a ratio of 10:1 or 100:1 for lines of GPL vs. lines of "shared source?"

Are you aware of non-GPL FOSS licenses?

> Basically all GPL code is available on the web

Basically true if you add "to paying customers", there's no obligation to publish it otherwise. You can even sell your GPL software on DVD if you like.

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