⚡ Open-Source 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, open-source licenses are detected on 0.4% of all websites.
98.1% of these sites use only one license, 1.8% use two.

Statistics based on 3.3M+ analyzed websites. About this data

⭐ 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 9.5% and MIT with 2.4%.

Creative Commons 87.6%
GNU 9.5%
MIT 2.4%
Apache 1.9%
BSD 0.5%
MPL 0.08%

You can also drill down by country:

✨ 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.	9.5%
3	MIT Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States A permissive software license that allows reuse, modification, distribution, and commercial use without requiring source code disclosure.	2.4%
4	Apache Wilmington, Delaware, United States A permissive software license that allows use, modification, distribution, and commercial use without requiring source code disclosure.	1.9%
5	BSD Boulder, Colorado, United States BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses that allow software to be used, modified, and redistributed with minimal restrictions.	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%

👉 See Also

Open-source license

🗃️ About This Data

We evaluate the popularity of technologies based on the number of websites where we detect their usage.
Technologies without a detectable web footprint, and those we do not track, are not reflected in the calculated market share.
This report is based on the analysis of 3,371,595 websites.
We currently track the presence of 6 licenses across the web.
Statistics were last calculated on April 20, 2026.
For more details, see our methodology and disclaimer.