News: 0180462941

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Open Source Initiative Estimates the 'Top Open Source Licenses in 2025' (opensource.org)

(Saturday December 27, 2025 @05:34PM (EditorDavid) from the taking-license dept.)


The nonprofit Open Source Initiative offers "enriched" [1]license pages with "relevant metadata to provide deeper insights and better support".

So which pages got the most pageviews in 2025? The MIT license, Apache 2.0 license, BSD licenses (3-clause and 2-clause), and GNU General Public license:

[2]mit

(1.5M)

[3]apache-2-0

(344k)

[4]bsd-3-clause

(214k)

[5]bsd-2-clause

(128k)

[6]gpl-2-0

(76k)

[7]gpl-3-0

(55k)

[8]isc-license-txt

(35k)

[9]lgpl-3-0

(34k)

[10]OFL-1.1

(31k)

[11]lgpl-2-1

(24k)

.

. From [12]the Open Source Initiative's announcement :

> Please note that these are aggregated pageviews from actual humans along the year of 2025... Actual humans (presumably) because the number of requests by bots or crawlers is several orders of magnitude higher (e.g. requests just for the MIT license are on the range of 10M per month).

>

> We do provide an [13]API service that gives access to the canonical list of OSI Approved Licenses — this is a very new service, which hopefully will be adopted by automated requests from CI/CD pipelines. One final observation is that the number of human pageviews is likely higher because we are using Plausible as our [14]data source and a high percentage of our target audience uses Ad blockers, which by design are not accounted by Plausible. Users from China are also likely undercounted by Plausible for the same reason.



[1] https://opensource.org/license

[2] https://opensource.org/license/mit

[3] https://opensource.org/license/apache-2-0

[4] https://opensource.org/license/bsd-3-clause

[5] https://opensource.org/license/bsd-3-clause

[6] https://opensource.org/license/gpl-2-0

[7] https://opensource.org/license/gpl-3-0

[8] https://opensource.org/license/isc-license-txt

[9] https://opensource.org/license/lgpl-3-0

[10] https://opensource.org/license/OFL-1.1

[11] https://opensource.org/license/lgpl-2-1

[12] https://opensource.org/blog/top-open-source-licenses-in-2025

[13] https://opensource.org/blog/introducing-the-new-api-for-osi-approved-licenses

[14] https://plausible.io/opensource.org/pages?f=contains,page,license&period=12mo&keybindHint=L


What I would prefer discussing (Score:4, Insightful)

by test321 ( 8891681 )

the trends in their uses. They could quantify for example how many packages were created on github during last year with each licence, or how many packages had at least 1 commit.

The most ignored list (Score:2)

by devslash0 ( 4203435 )

This looks to me like the list of most ignored T&C in the history of software. Let's be honest, no one gives gives a crap about the licence if your code is publicly available to steal. Big corps will take your hard work, turn it into profit and write off any unlikely licence breach fines from their costs.

Re: (Score:2)

by JamesTRexx ( 675890 )

I was thinking if this list could be combined with for instance the Tiobe programming popularity list, so we can have in-depth flamewa^w debates as usual. ;-)

I'm not sure what this is telling us (Score:2)

by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 )

It seems like this result muddles a couple different things - familiarity with licenses and frequency of a license's use.

- The sort of people who care about open-source licenses at all may be more likely to think they already understand the gpl versus the mit or apache license (all of which are widely used) and thus less likely to look it up

- Licenses which are less widely used are not going to be looked into as much

Re: (Score:2)

by caseih ( 160668 )

This is why I always recommend that would-be open source developers who have no real concept of the different license default to GPLv3 or later. As the author of the work you can change you mind on the license at any time, so having the default be GPLv3 protects you the most, while allowing you the flexibility to change the license, or even add licenses including proprietary licenses in the future. If your code attracts the attention of a big company who finds value it in, negotiate a proprietary license a

Free support for billion dollar businesses (Score:3)

by caseih ( 160668 )

I'm always surprised how many open source developers prefer the MIT license which has the dual properties of letting big companies make money off your work for free, and also the big companies expecting to get support and bug fixes for free. That license (and also the BSD license) seems to favor large, proprietary companies far more than any other party, including the developers themselves. The only advantage to the open source community that I can see is the MIT license is generally compatible with most of open source licenses.

I conceded that incompatible open-source licenses is a huge problem when developing open source software. Of course the big companies rarely care about that since they rarely face any significant penalty for stealing code outright.

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