Some hard numbers on licenses used by elisp packages

[Jonas Bernoulli <jonas@bernoul.li>]

Hello,

While the current discussions focus on copyright assignments, I think
it would be a good idea to have some statistics on what licenses are
being used by Emacs packages.

Luckily answering such questions is one of the many use cases of the
Emacsmirror [1], which I maintain.

Here are the licenses used by packages that are available from Melpa:

| License       | Count | Percent |
|---------------+-------+---------|
| GPL-3         |  2268 |      62 |
| GPL-2         |   634 |      17 |
| (unknown)     |   509 |      14 |
| as-is         |   117 |       3 |
| MIT           |    45 |       1 |
| public-domain |    41 |       1 |
| GPL           |    29 |       1 |
| Apache-2.0    |    18 |       0 |
| GPL-1         |     4 |       0 |
| BSD           |     3 |       0 |
| CeCILL-B      |     2 |       0 |
| EPL           |     1 |       0 |
| MS-PL         |     1 |       0 |
|---------------+-------+---------|
| total GPL     |  2935 |      80 |
|---------------+-------+---------|
| total         |  3672 |     100 |

You can find more such tables on [2], along with some notes on how this
information was obtained and more.

[1] https://emacsmirror.net
[2] https://emacsmirror.net/stats/licenses.html

  Best regards,
  Jonas