One of the pillars of free software has long been copyleft licenses such as the GPL, LGPL, and AGPL. In 2012, they were used by 59% of all open source projects. However, according to WhiteSource, as of 2019, their only 33%. The remaining open source software products are available under permissive (permissive) licenses.
Experts analyzed 4 million open packages and 130 million files in 200 programming languages. As reported, the reason for this change could be a new situation in the market. According to one of the leaders of WhiteSource, the very concept of "copyleft" arose as an antonym to "copyright", when free software was the main weapon of opposition to corporations.
In the early 2000s, it was copyleft licenses that made it possible to prevent the use of open source for sale (although some still managed to do this). And permissive licenses have been used in recent years. The reason for this has been the convergence of corporations and communities, such as IBM's acquisition of developer Red Hat or GitHub's purchase by Microsoft.
In addition, open source software is increasingly being integrated into business processes, and this requires appropriate legal justifications. These are the permissive licenses. Simply put, the reason for the hostility between open source and proprietary software has disappeared.
By the way, this is the difference between the GPL and, for example, MIT and Apache. In the first case, copyleft licenses imply that derivative products must also be open source. Whereas permissive licenses allow the option of their use in closed projects.
By the way, now a new confrontation is gaining momentum in the market. Cloud services often use open source products for their systems, but do not help in their development. Because of this, projects are forced to switch to proprietary licenses.
Source: 3dnews.ru
