⚡ Open-Source Licenses in Japan

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

Japan is an East Asian country with a population of around 125 million people.

According to our statistics, open-source licenses are detected on 0.1% of websites from Japan.

Statistics based on 159K+ analyzed websites. About this data

⭐ Most Popular in 2026

The following chart shows the top licenses on websites in Japan in 2026, based on market share.

The most popular is Creative Commons, which dominates the market with a substantial 69.6% share.
It is followed by GNU with 28.6% and MIT with 1.8%.

Creative Commons 69.6%
GNU 28.6%
MIT 1.8%
BSD 1.3%
Apache 0.4%

🚀 Highlights

Here is a list of the top licenses that are more popular in Japan than worldwide.
Differences between global and country rankings are shown in parentheses.

4. BSD ^(-1)

✨ Top Licenses

Below is a more detailed list of 5 licenses used on sites from Japan, 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.	69.6%
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.	28.6%
3	MIT Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States A permissive software license that allows reuse, modification, distribution, and commercial use without requiring source code disclosure.	1.8%
4	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.	1.3%
5	Apache Wilmington, Delaware, United States A permissive software license that allows use, modification, distribution, and commercial use without requiring source code disclosure.	0.4%

👉 See Also

🌎 Licenses in other countries

🗃️ 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 159,861 websites from Japan.
We currently track the presence of 6 licenses across the web.
Of these, 5 were detected on websites from Japan.
Statistics were last calculated on April 20, 2026.
For more details, see our methodology and disclaimer.