Open Source Initiative Estimates the 'Top Open Source Licenses in 2025'

The nonprofit Open Source Initiative offers 'enriched' license pages with 'relevant metadata to provide deeper insights and better support'.

So which pages got the most pageviews in 2025? The MIT license, Apache 2.0 license, BSD licenses (3-clause and 2-clause), and GNU General Public license:


mit
(1.5M)
apache-2-0
(344k)
bsd-3-clause
(214k)
bsd-2-clause
(128k)
gpl-2-0
(76k)
gpl-3-0
(55k)
isc-license-txt
(35k)
lgpl-3-0
(34k)
OFL-1.1
(31k)
lgpl-2-1
(24k)..

From the Open Source Initiative's announcement:

Please note that these are aggregated pageviews from actual humans along the year of 2025... Actual humans (presumably) because the number of requests by bots or crawlers is several orders of magnitude higher (e.g. requests just for the MIT license are on the range of 10M per month).

We do provide an API service that gives access to the canonical list of OSI Approved Licenses — this is a very new service, which hopefully will be adopted by automated requests from CI/CD pipelines. One final observation is that the number of human pageviews is likely higher because we are using Plausible as our data source and a high percentage of our target audience uses Ad blockers, which by design are not accounted by Plausible. Users from China are also likely undercounted by Plausible for the same reason.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.