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Following up on a subject implicated in recent (see viewtopic.php?t=24732 & viewtopic.php?f=1&t=24734) and older (e.g., viewtopic.php?t=23262) discussions here at TPFC forums, two articles that bring more insight on the moving panorama of OSS and licensing.

A substantial percentage of the users and creators of OSS today are young enough to have never known a world that didn't rely on OSS. In other words, it's very easy to take this remarkable product of open collaboration for granted.

In 2019, 33% of the software in the WhiteSource data set relied on copyleft licenses while 67% of the software favored a permissive open-source license, three percentage points more than in 2018. Rewind to 2012 and copyleft licenses could be found with 59% of projects while permissive licenses accompanied just 41%.

Note: I couldn't find a better version of the barely readable graph embedded in the latter article, so I quickly redid it with copyleft in blue and permissive in yellow -- numbers only, sorry...

In addition to open source programs everyone is aware of in this site, open source libraries (which have to be permissively licensed to really be useful) are arguably even more important. They're used as building blocks in virtually all software out there. I work as a programmer for two companies at the moment: open source libraries are used in both of them. And we don't even really think about the situation because it has just become such an everyday thing.

One of the things I develop at work is a server for a multiplayer mobile game written on Node.js (which is itself open source). On Node.js there is a library ecosystem called NPM with a rather interesting culture where just about everything imaginable is wrapped into a package (the NPM term for a library) which then depend on each other. Our server itself depends on 21 packages directly: between them and their own dependencies (recursively), the total number of packages it uses is around 500. And AFAIK that's an abnormally low number for Node.

SYSTEM wrote: ↑In addition to open source programs everyone is aware of in this site, open source libraries (which have to be permissively licensed to really be useful) are arguably even more important.

When using Linux that fact becomes entirely self-evident, I'd say.