Analyst: Copyleft in decline

"You can use this software freely. The only restriction is that you keep it free." "RESTRICTION? NO FAIR! *I* wanted to be the one making the restrictions!"

Seriously, I've said it elsewhere and I'll say it here: this is like complaining that I'm not "free" because I'm forbidden from owning or becoming a slave...

Quoting: Dictionary definition of Decline: :

A gradual and continuous loss of strength, numbers, or quality

Quoting:Aslett notes though that the number of projects using GPL licences is still increasing and shows a 29% growth over the same period. But on the same basis, Apache licensed projects grew by 46% and MIT licensed projects grew by 152%

This statement contradicts the little. How is it in decline when it is increasing by 29% over same period? Doesn't make sense to me unless it is declining relative to other licenses.

The author is playing with words.

It's a conclusion in search of proof... That's what it is...

When an article like that appears, one should wait several days, and then also look at the comments(if any published) on that article, to find out more ... my 2cents ... ;-P :

nilie wrote:The author means the software vendors have increasingly managed to suck communities of developers into handing over their code for free to companies that will take that code proprietary and sell it without having to give back anything to the community. Nice!

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/forum/S-A-little-correctio...

Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:Please note that despite many inquiries that I’ve made to Black Duck, they absolutely refuse to publish their methodology and mechanisms for producing these “findings”. This isn’t a scientific study, it’s just Black Duck marketing materials. The material should be therefore ignored by serious researchers in my opinion.

I’ll note that Google’s similar analysis, which actually is more favorable for GPL, suffers from similar problems unfortunately.

http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2011/06/06/the-trend...