Re: The sad decline of copyleft software licenses? :(

[Jean Louis]

* Marinus Savoritias <marinus.savoritias@disroot.org> [2020-09-23 00:42]:
> The problem is though that if somebody wants to write a program he doesn't
> want to have meetings with lawyers first. He just wants to write a program.
> By making it harder for people to start writing a program you end up in a
> situation where nobody uses your license. And then you have the title of the
> original email. Which seems to come true if GPL is as hard as you
> say it is.

As I continually use mostly the GNU GPL licensed software, I do not
see it that way that one ends up in situation where nobody uses your
license, as there are no specific statistics about it -- and my
personal opinion is that now there is more than ever GNU GPL licensed
software. 

If company wish to produce program, they do consult a lawyer. If
single person wish to program, that one will usually learn about
licensing and will decide about it.

So let me give you example from one of my Debian VPS servers:

- I did not verify all packages, as I do not know the method. I know
  that most of Debian packages hold documentation in /usr/share/doc,
  so I keep there documentation for 1493 packages.

admin@server:/usr/share/doc$ find . -name copyright -exec grep -l "The Regents 
of the University" {} \;|wc
grep: ./python3-debian/examples/copyright: Is a directory
    159     159    3784

So I got 159 results for The Regents, I guess it is permissive
license. It is not accurate.

find . -name copyright -exec grep -l "Free Software Foundation" {} \;|wc
grep: ./python3-debian/examples/copyright: Is a directory
    905     905   23657

So I have got about 905 results for GPL licenses.

I guess that results are not accurate. 429 other files could be as
well different licenses.

At my server there is majority of GNU GPL licensed software. That is
one particular and specific statistic.

That is why I cannot agree with it that nobody uses the licenses, GNU
GPL is most popular license and there is more and more GNU GPL
software.

Jean