[OSGeo-Discuss] The importance of a project's license

[Mateusz Loskot]

On 27 July 2012 15:27, Seven (aka Arnulf) <seven at arnulf.us> wrote:
> On 07/27/2012 11:45 AM, Mateusz Loskot wrote:
>> On 27 July 2012 05:55, Alex Mandel <tech_dev at wildintellect.com> wrote:
>>> This is a really interesting debate. Reading the links provided it also
>>> appears to be a mixed bag about acceptance of LGPL of various firms and
>>> I'm also sure many of us can name firms that have no issue shipping LGPL
>>> components.
>>
>> GPL is dying, of natural causes.
>>
>> http://ostatic.com/blog/the-top-licenses-on-github
>>
>> Best regards,
>
> (I don't think that GPL is dying, it is still 70% on SourceForge last
> time I checked)

As I mentioned, SF.net hosts tons of old, obsolete and inactive projects.

> The more interesting question is - what are the "natural causes"?

IMO:
BSD, MIT, Boost...licenses are freer and this freedom is apparently
important for new projects and initiative, especially if the future
is unclear. Another important aspect is the simplicity: if I'm not a lawyer,
and I don't care about hiring one, but I'm not sure about the terms
(and future of my project), I go for simplest reasonable.
Finally, I do dare statement, that nowadays most of FOSS code is
written on request by companies or individual investors who pay
hard cash for most of lines of code written in FOSS projects.
The clientelle seems to prefer the freer freedom too.

Best regards,
-- 
Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net