Top Open Source licenses in 2025

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) serves as the premier resource for millions of visitors seeking essential information about OSI-Approved licenses. The enriched license pages go beyond basic descriptions, incorporating relevant metadata to provide deeper insights and better support for Open Source users, developers, and organizations.

The most popular licenses include the MIT license, Apache 2.0 license, BSD licenses (3-clause and 2-clause), and GNU General Public license (2.0 and 3.0). These licenses continue to lead the way as the go-to choices for countless Open Source projects worldwide, reflecting their widespread adoption and versatility.

Here’s the top 20 OSI-Approved licenses most frequently sought out by our community in 2025 based on number of pageviews.

Please note that these are aggregated pageviews from actual humans along the year of 2025. Aggregated because several entry points might point to the same page (e.g. uppercase vs lowercase license names) or there’s a minor version update (2.0 vs 2.1). 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.

You can compare the results from 2025 with the results from 2024. It’s also worth highlighting other data sources, such as from GitHub Innovation Graph (2025), Zhejiang University (2024), ClearlyDefined (2023), or Software Heritage (2022). If you would like to support a comprehensive research on Open Source license popularity for 2026, please reach out to us.

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