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MIT and Apache 2.0 Lead Open Source Licensing in 2025 (linuxiac.com)

submitted 1 week ago by cm0002@no.lastname.nz to c/opensource@programming.dev

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The Open Source Initiative, a nonprofit organization that promotes and protects open source software, has published its annual ranking of the most viewed open source licenses in 2025, reflecting the preferences and priorities of developers, organizations, and open source communities worldwide.

At the top of the 2025 rankings is the MIT License, maintaining its long-standing position as the most sought-after open-source license. With approximately 1.53 million pageviews and 925,000 unique visitors, the MIT License’s permissive terms and minimal restrictions remain highly attractive for projects ranging from personal open source repositories to large-scale commercial products.

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[–] fruitcantfly@programming.dev 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

The problem is not the conclusion*. The problem is that the method used to reach it is terrible.

As you say, you could look at license popularity on GitHub, and the author should have done something like that, but even those statistics have to be interpreted carefully:

Each data point corresponds to the rank of a license based on the count of unique developers who uploaded code to a repository subject to the terms of that license during a given quarter.

In other words, this measures how many developers are commiting code under each license, and thus is more of a reflection of the popularity of software under each license, rather than the licenses themselves.

Perhaps a more meaningful measure would be how many (unique) repositories are created with each license, since a developer commiting code to a repo does not mean that they favor the license of that repo. I couldn't find numbers for 2025, but amusingly these totals from 2020 suggest that no license is the most popular license, followed by MIT and then Apache

* The majority of my own code is MIT, by a large margin-

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Fair enough I suppose. There is no guarantee that pageviews reflect usage. In this case though, the error is likely to skew even further towards popularity.

The OSI website is not Distrowatch. Why would a user be looking up a license?

I would say that “I would guess” that the OSI page view ranking mirrors real world popularity. I do not have to guess though as I can see that this is the case. So I will have to settle with saying I am not surprised.

I mean, I would not trust the results too far down the list but I fully expected the first 5 or so to align.