GPL, Copyleft On the Rise 277
paxcoder writes "Contrary to earlier analyses that predicted a decline of copyleft software share to as little as 50% this year, John Sullivan, the executive director of the Free Software Foundation, claims the opposite has happened: In his talk at FOSDEM 2012 titled 'Is Copyleft Being Framed?,' Sullivan presented evidence (PDF) of a consistent increase of usage of copyleft licenses in relation to the usage of permissive licenses in free software projects over the past few years. Using publicly available package information provided by the Debian project, his study showed that the number of packages using the GPL family in that distribution this year reached a share of 93% of all packages with (L)GPLv3 usage rising 400% between the last two Debian versions."
Obvious problem with the research (Score:3, Funny)
So one study, which looks at the wide ecosystem of open source software finds copyleft is on the decline. But a study which only focuses on a Linux distribution which has a strong focus on GPL finds copyleft is increasing? Isn't that a bit like going to a Green Peace rally and saying a majority of people surveyed support saving whales?
Re:Cherrypicking sources (Score:0, Funny)
Well that's neat. Are they using packages that aren't three years old in stable yet? No? Well fuck Debian then.
Incidentally, your kind's elitism ("isn't worth touching" indeed) is the _second_ biggest reason for that same sentiment
Your anti-Debian anti-elitism elitism is the _first_ biggest reason why you're an irritable menstruating douchebag.