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frojack writes:

Two stories appeared recently, The problem with license trends in Bruce Byfield's Blog on Linux Magazine's site, and the other on ZDNet, titled The Fall of the GPL and the rise of permissive licenses which both point out some worrying trends in open source licensing.

The first point both articles make is that there is an increasingly cavalier choice of open software licenses selected by projects. Many projects seem to choose a license at random or simply adopt what ever license was in vogue on the platform where they started development. Aaron Williamson, senior staff counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center, discovered that 85.1 percent of GitHub programs had no license at all.

Byfield spends much of his article explaining just how hard it is to actually obtain any reliable statistics. So many software sites simply fail to mention licenses in their repository directories, that one is reduced to google searching for license names, which often shows nothing at all. There are few ways to gather any statistics other than brute force download or researching project by project. Byfield's point is that nobody has done this in a believable way.

The trend seems clear that those who do choose a license are increasingly choosing MIT/BSD virtually un-restricted licensing for new projects as opposed to any versions of the GPL. From the ZDnet article:

(Apache/BSD/MIT) ... collectively are employed by 42 percent. They represent, in fact, three of the five most popular licenses in use today." These permissive licenses has been gaining ground at GPL's expense. The two biggest gainers, the Apache and MIT licenses, were up 27 percent, while the GPLv2, Linux's license, has declined by 24 percent.

It could be that those NOT choosing a license are simply tired of the whole argument, realize they will never be in a position to enforce any license anyway, and simply cast their code to the wind and trust to the mantra of "prior art". You would think that the generation that grew up with Groklaw and the SCO wars would actually care about this issue. One would think that watching Apple take BSD from open source to closed source while hurling sue-balls left and right would have served as a warning.

Or it could be a realization that the restrictions imposed by the GPL and other "copyleft" licenses are, in their own way, almost as burdensome as some commercial licenses. Or maybe it is the subtle differences in the GPL, GPLv2, GPLV3, LGPL, LGVLv2, LGPLv3, Affero-v1, Affero-v2, (ad infinitum) are so confusing that even a comparison chart of license features is confusing and bewildering to many who just want to cut code.

Are those of us in the software industry just making a mess for the future with all these licenses? Have we thrown up our collective hands in despair? Has the GPL-style copyleft license outlived its usefulness?