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.
Is this LLM BS?
After reading the abstract, I was interested in what the article says about that. And the only thing I found is a section about page views.
How can you jump from a statistics about license viewing to that it is the most widely used?
No, I did not miss anything because the author goes on with
Well, you could also count packages in most Linux repos. You would reach the same conclusions.
Or, you could look at licenses on GitHub. The same story is repeated there.
I take it this collides with your assumptions?
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:
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-
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.
Manjaro is more widely used than ubuntu based on page hits on distrowatch
“Most widely used licenses” is something that we can actually measure by counting (relevant) repos.
Page hits may be used to measure “popular” licenses since popular is subjective.
Licenses are chosen by devs, not users. License viewers are also users, not only devs. There are more users than devs. A fraction of users could distort the measure. At best page hits are a proxy but not a definite measure.
I totally understand the reaction. The objection makes sense.
The Distrowatch numbers are clearly nonsense. The biggest reason they are nonsense is because they feed into each other. “Oh hey, I have never heard of MX Linux, I wonder what that is”. Click. And nobody needs to be told what Ubuntu is.
But I full expect the traffic pattern at a website like OSI to be quite different. And what brings people to a license page to begin with?
Anyway, we can see from the results that the methodology is not as flawed as we fear. Because it closely aligns with other sources.
But again, I get the objection. We would have to take these conclusions with a grain of salt and agreement with other sources before basing any decisions on it.
Still, I found it interesting.
Thankfully, we have much better data on license popularity than we do for say programming language popularity, or Linux distribution use for that matter.