> Surely the number of users using the software is the best metric? no. > Or the number of lines of code under the license? no. > Or the number of committer

> Surely the number of users using the software is the best metric? no. > Or the number of lines of code under the license? no. > Or the number of committers collectively working on projects under that license? Or the number of published articles advocating for it? sorry, no and no. If I sold cars, and you asked me how popular my car is, the only metric would be, how many did I sell (not how big is it, or how many people it took to build, or how many articles were published about it). This is not a hard question. You can count projects on github and elsewhere and what licenses they are using and that's your answer. the GPL is declining for reasons the author points out, that GPL doesn't work for libraries and frameworks: "For developers mixing ingredients from multiple origins – frameworks, components, libraries – reciprocal license requirements increase the uncertainty rather than decrease it." What he fails to quote a statistic for (and I'd be curious to see) would be what percentage of open source projects are fully realized applications (like LibreOffice) vs. libraries/ frameworks (like the enormous number of libraries for Python, Javascript, Ruby, Go), and how has that number been changing over the years. Years ago I was planning to release SQLAlchemy on the LGPL and I was quickly talked out of it, reminded that the langauge of the LGPL is archaically focused on C-centric concepts like linkers and that it scares the crap out of legal departments. I haven't looked since but it seems like Gnu hasn't improved upon that situation. The author refers to open source as " the “safe space” in which developers with an interest in a piece of software, for whatever reason, are able to collaborate over its evolution without the motivations of others impacting their own usage." - for me and probably most other people, that's a BSD-like license, so that all your collaborators who are after all using your software to produce something in-house at their place of employment, can freely use and contribute to your software without them being hindered by their company legal departments.