Is the GPL Really Declining?

There was a time when it seemed inconceivable that developers would be motivated to release code under MIT or BSD style licenses that lacked the "viral" distribution obligations of the GPL. Back then, it seemed obvious that a healthy open source community was going to need to force "borrowers" of the code to contribute their improvements in order to avoid freeloading. However, the reality is that plenty of healthy open source communities exist on MIT style licenses and even include corporate community members who are willing to subsidize improvements that get merged into the public editions. In this way, the "failure" of GPL is a story about people behaving well as a community without needing to have legal whips cracked at them

>The GPL licence just causes more pain and frustration to developers.

I don't think this is true. It's not particularly hard for developers to comply with it, especially those who are used to operating in an environment where most software is proprietary. This is the world where corporate licenses and contracts end up regularly end up into triple-digit page lengths. It's where the answer from management to the question "can we use this third party software?" usually defaults to no regardless of the license. So as long as there is this kind of restrictive proprietary licensing, I believe there will be a need for copyleft to counterbalance it. Sometimes there is a real risk of a rogue organization trying to take free (libre) code in order to crush the community with it.

The fact that there is so much software out there that uses non-copyleft free software licenses I think is testament to how many, many of our techniques and algorithms have become trivial and commonplace. This is good that friction is being removed in these cases, no matter what license the downstream developers are planning on using. It's the sign of a mature industry.

The last time I went through my employer's process for releasing an open source project, the attorney assigned to our case emailed to ask if we really wanted to choose the GPL, as we'd stated on the application form, because getting approval for MIT or Apache was going to be quicker.

We advised that yes, we did want the GPL, and indeed we didn't run into any further problems.

Keeping up the good fight in the midst of a megacorp, one tiny little utility at a time...

> I think more permissive license have allowed a lot of companies to wave the banner of OSS while not having to really contribute things back to the community.

Another way to look at this is that it has allowed companies to contribute to open source at all.

We'll never see how the industry would have developed if there had only been GPL and closed source with nothing in between but I believe we're better off this way because I don't think enough closed source companies would have made the jump to GPL.

Right now I'm using an open source OS published by a commercial company, running an open source browser published by a commercial company and make my living developing software using open source libraries published by commercial companies. Most of the software these companies produce is open source and most of the open source software is non-GPL, yet they are enabling me to stand on their shoulders for free.

Political tangent: I think a pure GPL open source ecosystem is impossible in a capitalist environment. Much like Communism it only works when executed at a global scale to achieve the critical mass. If GPL is Communism, non-GPL open source is Democratic Socialism. Purists think it's a stopgap at best or distraction at worst, pragmatists see it as the only viable alternative to the tyranny of closed source.

> Things like CLang/LLVM, and don't get me wrong, they're technologically amazing, still have a huge focus of not being in the GPL world.

This is one of the key things.

Generally, I see that BSD/MIT/ISC/Apache licensed software is made by people who just want to make amazing things, and let other people make amazing things with what they've made. The license is just a way to make their code (which is the focus) available to anyone, without legal questions.

For GPL, it seems like a lot of people (including RMS) value the license more than absolute code quality. They would rather have worse software, under their idealogical license, than use better software under a less restrictive license.