In view of the development trend of open source public copyright, whitesource, a software license management tool enterprise, has made new discoveries.currently popular license agreements, including gnu-led gplv2, gplv3, lgplv2.1, and loose licenses such as mit and apache 2.0. Its characteristic is that the software can be more or less operated without the prior permission of the owner to accelerate the promotion and popularization of related products.

(from: whitesource, via the register)

Persissive MIT and Apache don't have to undertake the corresponding obligations, and GPLv2, GPLv3 and LGPLv2.1 convey similar freedoms. Simply put, users are not allowed to publish restricted derivative versions.

Based on an analysis of more than 200 different programming languages, about 4 million open source packages and 130 million open source files, "The use of open source licenses continues to grow, but copy-left/GPL has been snubbed," WhiteSource found.

In 2019, 33% of software relies on the copy left license, and 67% of software tends to some kind of permission open-source license, an increase of three percentage points over 2018.

By contrast, in 2012, 59% of projects used copy-left licenses and only 41% were loose licenses.

This is consistent with the copy left trend observed by GitHub in 2015.David habusha, vice president of whitesource products, said in an email to the register:

The Free Software Foundation created the copy-left license in 1985 to ensure that then evil companies could not use open source software and restrict its redistribution.

In addition, in modern application software, the utilization rate of open source code has reached 60-80%.Even contrary to the freedom of such licensing, start-ups tend to build businesses around specific open source projects, as well as rely on software to withstand competition.

Popular open source projects (such as Elastic Search, RedisLab, Docker) are often accompanied by accusations against three major cloud service providers.

The controversy is mainly reflected in the excessive pursuit of monetization of open source projects, without giving the open source community due feedback. In the past 18 months, some companies have changed their licenses to prevent this trend from continuing.

Unfortunately, these remade permits are not well recognized.

For example, the Commons clause of redis labs restricts cloud providers from profiting from some redis codes, but it is resisted by the open source community, which finally turns to redis source available license.

Paul Berg, an open source licensing consultant who has worked with Amazon and Microsoft, suggests that the copy left license should not be counted. Because it is not compatible with entities that focus on proprietary code, the result is that loose licenses are more popular.

Copyright protection is a commonplace topic, but for the integration of proprietary licenses, more relaxed licenses such as Apache, MIT, and BSD have always been more popular.

This is to be expected, as easy licensing does not impose too many restrictions or obligations on the interface use of proprietary software, and copy-left does not want to release the right to redistribute.

In addition, we see a new upsurge of interest in copy left in cloud computing and other fields,For example, agpl license is more relaxed than GPL.

It has stronger guarantees that allow consumers to continue to be members of the community, not just to expand and re package the software for their own benefit.

Today, it's very rare to find a company that doesn't use open source software.

When authors grant proprietary intellectual property rights, it means they believe that their contribution is of high value. So much so that the private-furcated cost of maintenance-sharing projects has gone beyond the difficulty of integrating all development results.