Top Open Source Licenses | Black Duck Software
Posted by jpluimers on 2019/05/10
About a year and a half ago, I came across the pie chart far below.
Luckily, the WayBack machine keeps historic copies of that page, so I could deduct the below table over time indicating the historic popularity of each license.
- 20171001 – Top Open Source Licenses | Black Duck Software
- 20170824 – Top Open Source Licenses | Black Duck Software
- 20161006 – Top Open Source Licenses | Black Duck Software
- 20160510 – Top Open Source Licenses | Black Duck Software
My deduction so far:
- The top 5 has the same ranking, but different percentages
- The rise of the MIT license popularity comes almost entirely out of the other top 5 entries
- Below the top 5, it’s about percentage points that differ
I wonder how this evolves further over time.
Oh: and I need to improve my graphing skills to show this table in a nice graph better than the one on the right which has rank over time for reach license from 2016 until 2017.
This is the data extracted from the historic WayBack links:
| License | Rank20170824 | %20170824 | Rank20161006 | %20161006 | Rank20160510 | %20160510 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MIT License | 1 | 32% | 1 | 28% | 1 | 26% |
| GNU General Public License (GPL 2.0) | 2 | 18% | 2 | 20% | 2 | 21% |
| Apache License 2.0 | 3 | 14% | 3 | 16% | 3 | 16% |
| GNU General Public License (GNU) 3.0 | 4 | 7% | 4 | 8% | 4 | 9% |
| BSD License 2.0 (3-clause, New or Revised) License | 5 | 6% | 5 | 6% | 5 | 6% |
| ISC License | 6 | 5% | 8 | 4% | 9 | 2% |
| Artistic License (Perl) | 7 | 4% | 6 | 4% | 7 | 4% |
| GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) 2.1 | 8 | 4% | 7 | 4% | 6 | 4% |
| GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) 3.0 | 9 | 2% | 9 | 2% | 8 | 2% |
| Eclipse Public License (EPL) | 10 | 1% | 11 | 2% | 11 | 2% |
| Microsoft Public License | 11 | 1% | 10 | 2% | 10 | 2% |
| Simplified BSD License (BSD) | 12 | 1% | 12 | 1% | 14 | < 1% |
| Code Project Open License 1.02 | 13 | 1% | 13 | 1% | 12 | 1% |
| Mozilla Public License (MPL) 1.1 | 14 | < 1% | 14 | < 1% | 13 | < 1% |
| GNU Affero General Public License v3 or later | 15 | < 1% | 16 | < 1% | 16 | < 1% |
| Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) | 16 | < 1% | 15 | < 1% | 15 | < 1% |
| DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE | 17 | < 1% | 18 | < 1% | 19 | < 1% |
| Microsoft Reciprocal License | 18 | < 1% | 17 | < 1% | 17 | < 1% |
| Sun GPL with Classpath Exception v2.0 | 19 | < 1% | 19 | < 1% | 18 | < 1% |
| zlib/libpng License | 20 | < 1% | ||||
| CDDL-1.1 | 20 | < 1% | 20 | < 1% |
–jeroen
Source: Top Open Source Licenses | Black Duck Software
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