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Is use of the GPL really decreasing?

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OSS

Is it reasonable to raise the question "does X still matter?" when the X in question is in use among nearly two-thirds of the target users under discussion?

What I'm referring to here is an article on the Infoworld website, with the headline: "Does GPL still matter?" The standfirst reads "As open source gets more commercial, GPL's idealism is overridden by developers' business needs."

The author has spoken to a few businessman, a lawyer, a consultant, and the chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, and drawn a number of conclusions, some of them reasonable, others which don't quite hold up.

The premise of the whole article is that use of the GPL could be - yes, that's a hypothetical - starting to slide.

The apparent basis for this thesis is a survey by a company called Black Duck Software. The article states that even though there was strong growth in GPLv3 adoption, the percentage of open source projects using GPL variants fell from 70 percent to 65 percent compared to the previous year.

There are no actual numbers provided

rest here




Why The GPL Matters A Little Bit Less

informationweek.com/blog: The title of an InfoWorld/Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO)! Tech piece about the GPL tells it: "Does the GPL still matter?" The answer seems to be "Yes, but ... "

The short version is something I've talked about before: usage of open source licensing is balancing out between the GPL's variants and other licenses. Now some more folks are stepping up and saying why.

rest here

GPL still matters

rajshekhar.net: GPL is a developer friendly license. The basic premise of the GPL is that the user should not subtract from the freedom he gets when redistributing software. GPL is not restrictive. It merely insists that whoever takes from the common pool must contribute back to the pool.

I would like to point to these 2 articles in support of GPL

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