> > I don't know what is meant by "a lot of people." But there are some > statistics that seem to indicate a lot more people prefer the GPL. As > of June 2009, the GPL licenses accounted for ~ 65% usage. BSD > accounted for 6.3. Now I realize that's more than 30 months ago, or > two centuries in internet years. Still, I doubt there has been a big > swing in the intervening time. > > You can read more about it here: > http://www.blackducksoftware.com/news/releases/2009-06-30 >
According to the latest data ( http://osrc.blackducksoftware.com/data/licenses/index.php), there has in fact been a trend toward the more permissive licences (i.e., BSD, MIT, Apache, etc.), which now account for at least 26% of projects, with GPL dropping to only 57%. I think it also varies by type of software -- for example, at least in the Python and Ruby web development world, I think most frameworks and related tools tend to have permissive licenses like BSD and MIT. GPL might be more common for end-user software. Anthony
