The death of the GPL
No guarantees but my prediction is that we are going to see the gradual downfall of the GPL license over the next couple years. For awhile now there has been a trend of developers switching from GPL to less restrictive licenses, often citing the viral nature of the GPL as the reason.
Is it possible to save the GPL? It might be possible to save but the best solution would be to just let it go. The licenses that are better suited will come into it’s place.
The GPL stage of open source is ending and viral licenses are no longer needed to spread open source around. What we need now are licenses to make open source more usable. Some of the ones hat have been floating around have been the “unlicense” which effectively puts the work into public domain and ms-pl.
Is this trouble for the open source community? Absolutely not. It simply shows that it is going into a stable phase where it does not need developers to force adoption through licenses, and open source will be used regardless.
