Adoption




Historically, the GPL license family has been one of the most popular software licenses in the FOSS domain.

A 1997 survey of MetaLab, then the largest free software archive, showed that the GPL accounted for about half of the software licensed therein. Similarly, a 2000 survey of Red Hat Linux 7.1 found that 53% of the source code was licensed under the GPL. As of 2003update, about 68% of all projects and 82.1% of the open source industry certified licensed projects listed on SourceForge.net were from the GPL license family. As of August 2008update, the GPL family accounted for 70.9% of the 44,927 free software projects listed on Freecode.

After the release of the GPLv3 in June 2007, adoption of this new GPL version was much discussed and some projects decided against upgrading. For instance the Linux kernel, MySQL, BusyBox, AdvFS, Blender, VLC media player, and MediaWiki decided against adopting GPLv3. On the other hand, in 2009, two years after the release of GPLv3, Google open-source programs office manager Chris DiBona reported that the number of open-source project licensed software that had moved from GPLv2 to GPLv3 was 50%, counting the projects hosted at Google Code.

In 2011, four years after the release of the GPLv3, 6.5% of all open-source license projects are GPLv3 while 42.5% are GPLv2 according to Black Duck Software data. Following in 2011 451 Group analyst Matthew Aslett argued in a blog post that copyleft licenses went into decline and permissive licenses increased, based on statistics from Black Duck Software. Similarly, in February 2012 Jon Buys reported that among the top 50 projects on GitHub five projects were under a GPL license, including dual licensed and AGPL projects.

GPL usage statistics from 2009 to 2013 was extracted from Freecode data by Walter van Holst while analyzing license proliferation.

Usage of GPL family licenses in % on Freecode
2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014-06-18
72% 63% 61% 59% 58% approx. 54%

In August 2013, according to Black Duck Software, the website's data shows that the GPL license family is used by 54% of open-source projects, with a breakdown of the individual licenses shown in the following table. However, a later study in 2013 showed that software licensed under the GPL license family has increased, and that even the data from Black Duck Software has shown a total increase of software projects licensed under GPL. The study used public information gathered from repositories of the Debian Project, and the study criticized Black Duck Software for not publishing their methodology used in collecting statistics. Daniel German, Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Victoria in Canada, presented a talk in 2013 about the methodological challenges in determining which are the most widely used free software licenses, and showed how he could not replicate the result from Black Duck Software.

In 2015, according to Black Duck, GPLv2 lost its first position to the MIT license and is now second, the GPLv3 dropped to fourth place while the Apache license kept its third position.

Usage of GPL family licenses in the FOSS domain in % according to Black Duck Software
License 2008-05-08 2009-03-11 2011-11-22 2013-08-12 2015-11-19 2016-06-06 2017-01-02 2018-06-04
GPLv2 58.69% 52.2% 42.5% 33% 23% 21% 19% 14%
GPLv3 1.64% 4.15% 6.5% 12% 9% 9% 8% 6%
LGPLv2.1 11.39% 9.84% ? 6% 5% 4% 4% 3%
LGPLv3 ? (<0.64%) 0.37% ? 3% 2% 2% 2% 1%
GPL family together 71.72% (+ <0.64%) 66.56% ? 54% 39% 36% 33% 24%

A March 2015 analysis of the GitHub repositories revealed, for the GPL license family, a usage percentage of approximately 25% among licensed projects. In June 2016 an analysis of Fedora Project's packages revealed the GNU GPL version 2 or later as the most popular license, and the GNU GPL family as the most popular license family (followed by the MIT, BSD, and GNU LGPL families).

An analysis of whitesourcesoftware.com in April 2018 of the FOSS ecosystem saw the GPLv3 on third place (18%) and the GPLv2 on fourth place (11%), after MIT license (26%) and Apache 2.0 license (21%).

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