Open Source Initiative Estimates the 'Top Open Source Licenses in 2025' (opensource.org) 13
The nonprofit Open Source Initiative offers "enriched" license pages with "relevant metadata to provide deeper insights and better support".
So which pages got the most pageviews in 2025? The MIT license, Apache 2.0 license, BSD licenses (3-clause and 2-clause), and GNU General Public license:
From the Open Source Initiative's announcement:
Please note that these are aggregated pageviews from actual humans along the year of 2025... Actual humans (presumably) because the number of requests by bots or crawlers is several orders of magnitude higher (e.g. requests just for the MIT license are on the range of 10M per month).
We do provide an API service that gives access to the canonical list of OSI Approved Licenses — this is a very new service, which hopefully will be adopted by automated requests from CI/CD pipelines. One final observation is that the number of human pageviews is likely higher because we are using Plausible as our data source and a high percentage of our target audience uses Ad blockers, which by design are not accounted by Plausible. Users from China are also likely undercounted by Plausible for the same reason.
So which pages got the most pageviews in 2025? The MIT license, Apache 2.0 license, BSD licenses (3-clause and 2-clause), and GNU General Public license:
| mit | (1.5M) |
| apache-2-0 | (344k) |
| bsd-3-clause | (214k) |
| bsd-2-clause | (128k) |
| gpl-2-0 | (76k) |
| gpl-3-0 | (55k) |
| isc-license-txt | (35k) |
| lgpl-3-0 | (34k) |
| OFL-1.1 | (31k) |
| lgpl-2-1 | (24k) |
| . | . |
We do provide an API service that gives access to the canonical list of OSI Approved Licenses — this is a very new service, which hopefully will be adopted by automated requests from CI/CD pipelines. One final observation is that the number of human pageviews is likely higher because we are using Plausible as our data source and a high percentage of our target audience uses Ad blockers, which by design are not accounted by Plausible. Users from China are also likely undercounted by Plausible for the same reason.
What I would prefer discussing (Score:4, Insightful)
the trends in their uses. They could quantify for example how many packages were created on github during last year with each licence, or how many packages had at least 1 commit.
The most ignored list (Score:2)
This looks to me like the list of most ignored T&C in the history of software. Let's be honest, no one gives gives a crap about the licence if your code is publicly available to steal. Big corps will take your hard work, turn it into profit and write off any unlikely licence breach fines from their costs.
Re: (Score:2)
I was thinking if this list could be combined with for instance the Tiobe programming popularity list, so we can have in-depth flamewa^w debates as usual. ;-)
Re: (Score:2)
Let's be honest, no one gives gives a crap about the licence if your code is publicly available to steal. Big corps will take your hard work, turn it into profit and write off any unlikely licence breach fines from their costs.
Not if it's GPL. Corporations who have tried to "steal" GPL software have lost in court. And the remedy is not just fines. The offending parties have to remove the code.
I'm not sure what this is telling us (Score:2)
It seems like this result muddles a couple different things - familiarity with licenses and frequency of a license's use.
- The sort of people who care about open-source licenses at all may be more likely to think they already understand the gpl versus the mit or apache license (all of which are widely used) and thus less likely to look it up
- Licenses which are less widely used are not going to be looked into as much
Re: (Score:2)
This is why I always recommend that would-be open source developers who have no real concept of the different license default to GPLv3 or later. As the author of the work you can change you mind on the license at any time, so having the default be GPLv3 protects you the most, while allowing you the flexibility to change the license, or even add licenses including proprietary licenses in the future. If your code attracts the attention of a big company who finds value it in, negotiate a proprietary license a
Free support for billion dollar businesses (Score:3)
I'm always surprised how many open source developers prefer the MIT license which has the dual properties of letting big companies make money off your work for free, and also the big companies expecting to get support and bug fixes for free. That license (and also the BSD license) seems to favor large, proprietary companies far more than any other party, including the developers themselves. The only advantage to the open source community that I can see is the MIT license is generally compatible with most of open source licenses.
I conceded that incompatible open-source licenses is a huge problem when developing open source software. Of course the big companies rarely care about that since they rarely face any significant penalty for stealing code outright.
Re: (Score:2)
It's likely because companies often release code in MIT license. Microsoft's open source code is often MIT, for example.
It's also likely a lot of open-source used in companies is MIT on purpose - because you want it used by other companies.
GPLv3 unfortunately is a poison pill and its use has often been rejected by companies, resulting in alternative implementations in more suitable licenses - GPLv2 or MIT/apache/BSD.
How many of the GPL libraries simply get re-implemented simply to avoid license issues?
It's
Re: (Score:3)
Not sure what your point is regarding samba and the gplv3. If a hardware vendor doesn't want to abide the license it needs to write its own code instead of thinking it can get a free ride from free software. A vendor could abide by the gplv3 and still sell a good and successful product.
I repeat that if Linux had been any other license other than the gpl it would not be the juggernaut it is today. It probably would still exist but wouldn't be a major player.
Libraries are a case where the lgpl is probably
Re: (Score:2)
Or, it can just toss in the GPLv2 version of Samba and be done with it, and stick users with the need to keep re-enabling SMB1 support to use the network functionality of the product.
They don't have to write their own implementation, or oblige with the GPLv3. They could stick with an insecure version of
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Blaming Microsoft's insecure designs on competitors use of GPL software is ridiculous.
The truth is that Microsoft has a long, long history of staying backward compatible with all its own designs. This has nothing to do with being forced to keep insecure APIs around. It has everything to do with being aggressive about keeping all their existing customers on board and cutting off the air supply of their competitors.
Security is pure theatre in Redmond. Its purpose is marketing. A sop, to help large corpora
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IBM owns Red Hat. Linux is used by big corporations far more FreeBSD, or any of the BSDs.
Big Corporation Stealing Code?? (Score:2)