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Comment by nikcub | Hacker News Reader

even more pronounced when you look at web software. look at the most watched projects on Github and play spot the GPL license:

https://github.com/popular/watched

I couldn't count a single project. I have never used the GPL in any software I write because I want anybody to be able to use my software and contributions.

Google, Microsoft, Apple (who are actively purging what remains of GPL code) et al will not adapt your project for bundling or distribution or use if it is GPL. I think most developers are more interested in having users of their software than attempting to shoehorn them into some ideology, which is reflected in the license usage stats you see.

to add to that, the FSF completely screwed up v3 which likely scared away anybody who was on the fence about which way to go (it was also more to do with the anti-commercial rhetoric around the changes as it had to do with the changes themselves)

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I know there isn't an easy alternative to it, but that Github list is pretty wonky; things like impress.js and Devise are at the top of it, but are clearly not among the most important pieces of open source software. Similarly, I review other people's Rails apps for a living and have never seen a project use that particular top-of-the-list form builder.

I can only conclude that the number of Github users "watching" a particular repository is not a particularly useful metric for how good/important/popular that software is.

Finally, for obvious reasons, Github has a pronounced Ruby/Rails bias, and that community already has settled norms on licensing.

I noticed that - the fork list isn't a good representation either. It would be interesting to get a sample across github, bitbucket, google code and whatever that site is called that .NET developer use.

I don't think a survey of all of those site s combined would fall far from the 90-95% BSD/MIT license rate you see in the GitHub sample (again, talking about web related open source software).

Anecdotally, I have also noticed that many Android/iOS/mobile libraries are also MIT/Apache/BSD.

Like another commenter noted, the FSF (wow what a bad logo) recently did a survey of Debian packages that rebuts the 90-95% claim.

But there's no way to apples-apples this anyways. Communities like Rails produce starbursts of itsy bitsy little packages like form-building gems, and have MIT licensing norms. You'd need to normalize somehow for value or code base size.

What I'd say is that "GPL use is plummeting" is an extraordinary claim, that extraordinary evidence has not been marshaled to support it, and that a more likely phenomenon is that the GPL is roughly as strong as it's ever been in its original domain (the licensing of large, complex, expensive- to- produce software packages) and probably not as prevalent in some of the newer more... uh... casual... software development domains.

It's funny you point to GitHub considering git is GPLv2 licensed itself. I imagine many of the tools which make those projects possible are also GPL licensed.

OC should have said "GPLv3" instead of "GPL". Most companies are pretty comfortable with GPLv2.

jQuery Diaspora Linux

jQuery is also MIT licensed, which is why Microsoft was able to bundle it.

large parts of Diaspora are also dual-licensed (not sure what the breakdown is).

I am still going through the list and haven't found a single GPL-only licensed project

What about Linux? That said, it might be the exception that proves the rule!

how about Git itself?

focused on internet and webapp software and the trend there, which is overwhelmingly tilted towards the permissive licenses. much more than the 50/50 split suggested in the OP.

so the Q is why is the GPL getting so little adoption amongst web developers.

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