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Open Source: GPL is Losing Ground
While the GPL Open Source license is still the most popular license for Open Source products, it is losing ground. A year ago GPL was used for nearly 70 percent of Open Source projects, but now that number has dropped to 65 percent. That is based on numbers compiled by Black Duck software.
Part of the reason why the dominance of GPL is declining is that developers are showing greater preference to licenses that are even less restrictive than GPL.
Somewhat surprising is that the Open Source license created by Microsoft is gaining in popularity. Their license, called MS-PL, now ranks as the 10th most popular Open Source license arrangement, or about 1.02 percent of all Open Source projects. Most of the MS-PL projects are .Net oriented and can be found on Microsoft’s CodePlex website.
The Blank Duck survey also points out the trend that many vendors are using an “open-core” licensing model. In this model, companies offer a base open-source core platform and also offer another tier of products that are proprietary and that are built around the core. Examples of companies with open-core licensing strategies include MySQL, PostgresSQL and Continuent.