The GNU Public License has blazed a trail across the software landscape since its release in 1989.  The central proposition is that you can contribute to free software and be assured that your contributions will remain free.

This is different than several other models for “open source”:

• As early as the 1960s, mainframers were passing around tapes containing code they’d written.  This software was shared, but there was no guarantee some company wouldn’t take those free contributions and use them in one of their   commercial products.  Programmers knew that someone else might be getting rich off their work.
• Many companies will allow their customers access to their source code, often for a fee or at least for an NDA.  For example, there are plenty of institutions that have access to the Windows source code, but they can’t release a patch or fork Windows.
• Public domain, BSD, MIT, etc. licenses ensure that work is free, but is always at risk of commercialization.  Someone could take a piece of code, make improvements, and then release it for sale without ever contributing those improvements back to the community.

Part of the GPL’s popularity was undoubtedly the high quality Unix-like software that was released under it, famously nearly an entire operating system from the GNU project, with the Linux kernel the final critical piece.  While a modern Linux distro has software licensed under a variety of licenses, the core system is GPL.

I’d argue that without these high-profile components, the GPL would never have reached critical mass.

But For How Much Longer?

Over the past few years, the GPL has fallen out of fashion in favor of more permissive licenses, such as the MIT or Apache licenses.  There are several reasons for this:

• The age where hobbyists altruistically donated their time to donating code is less common than corporate-sponsored work.  Corporations are less enthused about the GPL and the “viral” nature of the code.  Even if they intend for their work to remain FOSS, it is still a compliance and tracking headache.
• The “freemium” model for software is very popular now, and this is easier to implement with more permissive licenses.
• Once those permissive licenses gained a critical mass, it’s been a fast-rolling snowball.  If you’re developing under the MIT or Apache license, you will prefer other permissively-licensed libraries, tools, and contributions to avoid complicating your licensing situation.
• Some in the *BSD community claim that the promise of the GPL attracting developers has never been fulfilled.  The OpenBSD project (licensed under the permissive BSD license) has stated multiple times that they receive many contributions from companies that use their code, so there is no advantage to adopting the GPL.

Nails in the Coffin

A couple big events have happened that are starting to nail down the lid on the GPL coffin.

First, LLVM/Clang has torpedoed GCC.  The former is Apache-licensed; the latter is a flagship GPL project.  As LLVM/Clang grows in popularity, GCC recedes.  Richard Stallman said over ten years ago that “the existence of LLVM is a terrible setback”.  LLVM has only grown in popularity since then.

Now comes uutils, which has rewritten much of the GNU project’s core utilities (la, cp, find, locate, diff, etc.) in Rust, for all the usual benefits, safety being primary.

And uutils is coming to a distro near you – Ubuntu 25.10, in fact.

How much longer will it be before other GNU Project components are replaced?  Or other GPL software?

• VIM is licensed under the GPL-like Vim license, but NeoVIM is Apache-licensed
• GNU Make has multiple competitors, notably Apache-licensed Ninja, which is used to build Chromium.
• GNU Bash was replaced by zsh on macOS, and it’s a serviceable replacement.
• The venerable libreadline has competition from the BSD-licensed libedit

And that’s without counting software which never had a GPL-licensed equivalent.  There is no GPL-licensed web server with any appreciable market share, for instance.

It would not be hard to assemble a Linux distro where the Linux kernel is the only major component that is under the GPL.  Eventually that may become the norm.

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raindog308

Dread Lord of LowEnd Content at LowEndBox

I'm raindog308, techno polymath and long-time LowEndTalk community Administrator. My technical interests include all things Unix, perl, python, golang, shell scripting, vintage operating systems such as MVS, and relational database systems such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.

I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308

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