Does GPL still matter?

“Jeff Haynie reached a crossroads last summer. Haynie, CEO of
Appcelerator, a firm that develops open source cross-platform
application development software, made a decision filled with
implications for his company’s future. That decision: to toss away
his upcoming product’s Gnu General Public License (GPL), the
best-known and most popular free software license, in favor of what
he viewed as a more business-friendly alternative. “We initially
started the product with a GPLv3 license and we decided last summer
to move the license to Apache,” Haynie says.

“Haynie isn’t the only business-oriented open source community
member to have made, or at least pondered, a move to a GPL-free
future. A June study conducted by Black Duck Software, an open
source development tools vendor, shows that the Free Software
Foundation’s GPL — although far and away still the dominant open
source licensing platform — could be starting to slide. The survey
found that despite strong growth in GPLv3 adoption, the percentage
of open source projects using GPL variants dropped from 70 to 65
percent from the previous year.”

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