In preparation for my presentation at OSBC tomorrow I’ve been looking back at some of the key trends that influenced the commercial open source landscape in 2009. One of those is the decline in the use of the GNU GPL as a proportion of all open source projects.

The decline was highlighted by figures from Black Duck Software in June 2009, which indicated a 5% decline in the use of the GPL, compared to the previous year.

At the time that reduction was put down to the move to Web applications and cloud computing, where the reciprocity of the GPL does not come in to play.

Looking at those figures again, and comparing them with the latest Black Duck numbers, I’m not convinced the answer is that simple.

rest here