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.
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.