Copyleft licenses are gradually being displaced by permissive ones.

WhiteSource analyzed licenses for 4 million open packages and 130 million code files in 200 different programming languages and found that the share of copyleft licenses is steadily decreasing. In 2012, 59% of all open projects were delivered under copyleft licenses such as GPL, LGPL, and AGPL, while the share of permissive licenses like MIT, Apache, and BSD was 41%. By 2016, the ratio changed in favor of permissive licenses, which claimed 55%. By 2019, the gap increased, with 67% of projects now using permissive licenses and 33% using copyleft.

According to one of the leaders at WhiteSource, the concept of copyleft emerged during a confrontation with corporations to prevent the use of open code for profit without giving back or limiting further distribution. The trend of increasing popularity for permissive licenses is due to the fact that there is no longer a clear division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the context of the conflict between corporations and the Open Source community, as well as the growing involvement of corporations in open source development, for which permissive licenses are more convenient and safer to use.

Instead of an opposition between corporations and the community, a struggle is gaining momentum between cloud providers and startups developing open projects. Dissatisfaction with cloud providers creating derivative commercial products and reselling open frameworks and databases as cloud services, while not participating in the community and not contributing to development, leads to projects moving to proprietary licenses or adopting the Open Coremodel. For example, similar changes recently affected projects like ElasticSearch, Redis, MongoDB, Timescale and CockroachDB.

It is worth noting that the difference between copyleft and permissive licenses lies in the requirement that copyleft licenses must maintain the original conditions for derivative works (in the case of GPL, the distribution of all derivative works under GPL is required), whereas permissive licenses allow for modification of these conditions and provide the possibility to use the code in closed projects.

Source: opennet.ru