Black Duck Software recently published some summary statistics about free and open source software license adoption. Any of these conclusions might be reasonable if the 5% figure was meaningful, but Black Duck has given us no reason to believe it is; if anything, their own statements suggest it isn't.
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magice
15 years 12 weeks 3 days 5 hours ago
Decline of GPL is believable
I personally think that the decline of GPL (all versions) is totally believable. In the last few months, we have heard all kind of press against the license. One one hand, we have Open Source advocates: Linus, for example, is against GPL 3; Eric Raymond once spoke that he though GPL was unnecessary and (if I remember right) dangerous. On the other hand, obviously we have corporations who have never liked GPL to begin with. Lastly, in the middle, we have a whole bunch of people against GPL for all sorts of reasons: some claim that GPL is all about free-as-in-free-beer; some others believe that GPL restricts (rather than protects) their rights; yet others talk about how GPL destroys businesses.
In sum, Free Software (more specifically, GPL) is under fire from just about everyone, including its supposed ally (aka Open Source).