On The Continuing Decline of the GPL

Our most popular CAOS blog post of the year, by some margin, was this one, from early June, looking at the trend towards persmissive licensing, and the decline in the usage of the GNU GPL family of licenses. Prompted by this post by Bruce Byfield, I thought it might be interesting to bring that post up to date with a look at the latest figures...

...The figures indicate that not only has the usage of the GNU GPL family of licenses (GPL2+3, LGPL2+3, AGPL) continued to decline since June, but that the decline has accelerated. The GPL family now accounts for about 57% of all open source software, compared to 61% in June.

As you can see from the chart below, if the current rate of decline continues, we project that the GPL family of licenses will account for only 50% of all open source software by September 2012...