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by ArneBab 3930 days ago
If you have a better source, feel free to share it. This is a datapoint which strongly disagrees with your claim. It might be flawed, but that does not make it invalid. Do you have data which supports your claim?

That RMS says that you can use Apache if you don’t want copyleft does not support that it’s the most widely suggested. You can be sure that RMS will not suggest using Apache over GPL where GPL can be used.

There are less people who are opposed to Apache than there are people who are opposed to the GPL (or strong copyleft in general), but that does not mean that there are more people who would suggest using Apache than people who would suggest using the GPL.

Free Software proponents will say “I would suggest GPL, but Apache is still Free Software, so it’s OK”. This is not the same as suggesting to use Apache.
1 comments
lighthawk 3930 days ago
When I say "most people suggest Apache", I mean that for as long as I have been contributing to and developing with various open-source projects most people that I have talked with about licensing open-source or free software projects have suggested using the Apache license. I have also had someone tell me that he wouldn't use my project since it was MIT licensed, and suggest I start writing code under the Apache license if I didn't want to use GPL. Personally I have frequently not chosen to use the Apache license, but that is changing and actually I've been using GPL v3 in some recent work.

I suggested not using Blackduck's stats because they are incomplete. I know this because I used Ohloh for a few years and found that there were many projects that weren't listed there, and I did not have time to list all of mine there, and I have quite a few.

I do not have enough information to say for certain that GPL or any other license is the most well used license. If I had to guess, I'd say that there would be quite a large amount of code that is available online that has no stated license, so I'd think that would be the most common. After that, it could be "any version of GPL"- I don't know. Maybe Google with all of their resources and analytics would be best suited for determining a good estimate.

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