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.
Is this LLM BS?
MIT and Apache 2.0 remain the most widely used open source licenses
After reading the abstract, I was interested in what the article says about that. And the only thing I found is a section about page views.
With approximately 1.53 million pageviews and 925,000 unique visitors, the MIT License’s permissive terms and minimal restrictions remain highly attractive […].
How can you jump from a statistics about license viewing to that it is the most widely used?
No, I did not miss anything because the author goes on with
Following the MIT License, the Apache License 2.0 ranks second in interest, drawing 344,000 pageviews
This whole article is hokey.
But assuming permissive licenses lead copyleft licenses, I think it’s unfortunate.