Copyleft licenses are gradually being replaced by permissive ones

Company WhiteSource analyzed licensed 4 million open packages and 130 million files with code in 200 different programming languages ​​and came to the conclusion that the share of copyleft licenses is steadily declining. In 2012, 59% of all open source projects were distributed under copyleft licenses such as GPL, LGPL and AGPL, while permissive licenses such as MIT, Apache and BSD accounted for 41%. In 2016, the ratio changed in favor of permissive licenses, which were won by 55%. By 2019, the gap has widened and supplies 67% of projects under permissive licenses, and 33% under copyleft.

According to one of the leaders of WhiteSource, the concept of copyleft arose during the confrontation with corporations in order to prevent the use of open source for selfish purposes without giving back or limiting further distribution. The trend of increasing popularity of permissive licenses is due to the fact that in modern realities there is no longer a division into one's own and another's, in terms of confrontation between corporations and the Open Source community, as well as the fact that corporations are becoming more involved in the development of open source software, which are more convenient and safer to use permissive licenses.

At the same time, instead of confrontation between corporations and the community, the confrontation between cloud providers and startups developing open projects is gaining momentum. Dissatisfaction with the fact that cloud providers create derivative commercial products and resell open frameworks and DBMS as cloud services, but do not take part in the life of the community and do not help with development, leads projects to move to proprietary licenses or to a model open core. For example, such changes have recently affected projects ElasticSearch, Redis, MongoDB, time scale и CockroachDB.

Recall that the difference between copyleft and permissive licenses is that copyleft licenses necessarily require that the original conditions for derivative works be preserved (in the case of the GPL, it is required to distribute the code of all derivative works under the GPL), while permissive licenses provide the ability to change the conditions, in including the ability to use the code in closed projects.

Source: opennet.ru