Busting the Myth of GPL Dominance: Apache Rules!

So we all know that most open source projects are licensed under the GPL - Ken Krugle's graph shows that clearly over 75% of projects are GPL or LGPL - but it turns out that most open source software used by enterprises are not licensed under the GPL ... companies are using primarily Apache licensed software! 

OpenLogic has over 300 projects in our open source software library - added by customer request.  (Our customers being large enterprises.)  Taking a look at those projects I discovered that:

• 29% of them are licensed under the GPL or LGPL
• 35% of them are licensed under the Apache license

But wait!  It gets even more interesting if you look at just the top 20 projects.  I sorted our library by number of customers actually using the open source software package, took the top 20, grouped by license and found:

• 75% Apache
• 20% GPL or LGPL
• 20% CPL, Eclipse, Perl, BSD
  

(Note that this ads up to more than 100% because several projects had several licenses.  That's why I didn't put these numbers in a pie chart - it would imply that each project just had one license.)

 So now the interesting question is: is this coincidence or cause and effect?

1. Do companies prefer the Apache license and so they tend to gravitate to projects licensed under the Apache license? 
2. Do companies have anti-GPL clauses in their open source policy that prevents them from using more GPL licensed software?  
3. Does the Apache Foundation (which is all Apache licensed) create better than average software and so that software tends to be more widely used? (Lots of projects on SourceForge are trial projects run by one person that never really went anywhere.)
   
4. Is there actually more Apache licensed code out there than people have been counting because they usually run their statistics on SourceForge data?
5. All of the above?

I'm voting on a little of all of the above.  What do you think?

 

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