GPL is getting less popular.

[viking60]

The GPL and AGPL license is getting less popular for open source projects. For these projects the BSD license is chosen more often because it makes it easier to mix proprietary software with open software.
Many companies seem to think that it makes it easier to make money on the products.

Ian Skerrett last week suggested that there is a growing trend in favour of permissive non-copyleft licenses at the expense of reciprocal copyleft licenses. Ian asked “name one popular community open source project created in the last 5 years that uses the AGPL or GPL?”

The responses didn’t exactly come thick and fast. I certainly couldn’t think of one. But the question did prompt me to look for some evidence for the trend away from copyleft licenses

It is worth noting that the number of projects using the GPL licenses has increased in real terms over the past few years. According to our calculations based on Black Duck’s figures, the number of GPLv2 projects rose 5.5% between June 2009 and June 2011, while the total number of open source projects grew over 16%.

[dedanna1029]

For the new ones watching here, it's worth noting that BSD is not Linux but the license can be used for Open Source projects, or proprietary projects whatever they are, which makes it more interesting & attractive both, but beware, the caviat is that it has the potential to make things more complicated as well.

[dedanna1029]

This is very interesting, considering the Linux kernel itself is under the GPL, *AFAIK* and IIRC. BSD does have quite a fair bit going for their license however, but their aim has profound differencs from the aim of the GPL, even beyond the proprietary/open source one. I think too, that Linux devels have fallen into a trap of just updating & upgrading what they already have that's under the GPL, without adding enough new software to it, so the GPL numbers will remain low. Still I think we're comparing in a way, apples to oranges with the two.