⚡ Software Licenses

Software licenses are legal agreements that explain how software can be used, modified, and redistributed by others.

Some licenses allow almost complete freedom with few conditions (such as the MIT or BSD licenses), while others require that changes remain open to everyone (GNU General Public License), include rules for sharing under the same license (MPL), or focus on giving credit and choosing how the work is reused (Creative Commons).

According to our statistics, software licenses are used on 0.4% of all websites.
98.2% of these sites use only one license, 1.8% use two.

⭐ Most Popular in 2026

The following chart shows the leading licenses on the web in 2026, based on market share.

The most popular is Creative Commons, which dominates the market with an overwhelming 87.6% share.
It is followed by GNU with 9.6% and MIT with 2.4%.

Creative Commons 87.6%
GNU 9.6%
MIT 2.4%
Apache 1.8%
BSD 0.5%
MPL 0.08%

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✨ Top Licenses

Below is a more detailed list of 6 licenses we detect, ranked by their market share.

Rank	Name	Market share
1	Creative Commons Mountain View, California, United States Creative Commons licenses are a set of standardized copyright licenses that let creators share their works with the public while clearly defining how others may use, remix, or redistribute them under specific conditions.	87.6%
2	GNU Boston, Massachusetts, United States The GNU General Public Licenses are a family of free, copyleft software licenses created to guarantee users the freedom to run, study, share, and modify software while ensuring those freedoms are preserved when the software is distributed.	9.6%
3	MIT Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States A permissive software license that allows commercial use and does not require that the source code be made available to end users.	2.4%
4	Apache Wilmington, Delaware, United States A permissive software license that allows commercial use and does not require source code to be disclosed.	1.8%
5	BSD BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses that impose minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software.	0.5%
6	MPL Mountain View, California, United States A free and open-source weak copyleft license that is more restrictive than the permissive software BSD-style licenses.	0.08%

Data is based on the analysis of 3,314,007 websites.
Statistics were last calculated on February 27, 2026.
For details, see our methodology and disclaimer.