The state of the copyleft license

In the public package managers, copyleft licenses are relatively rare, but their presence varies across ecosystems and package sizes. The largest package managers have a median percentage of copyleft around 8-10%, with some smaller ecosystems like Clojars and CRAN having significantly higher percentages. On the other hand, mobile-oriented package managers like CocoaPods and SwiftPM have very permissive licenses. When looking at the top packages in large repositories, the presence of copyleft licenses is generally lower, but still significant, with about 10% of the most depended packages being under some form of copyleft license. The distribution of copyleft types also varies across ecosystems, with network copyleft being a small portion and weak copylefts being more prevalent in some cases. Overall, these numbers provide a useful anchor for further discussion on the state of copyleft licenses in open source software.

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