I think you misunderstood canadaduane's point. There's no denying that a lot of popular open source software is not GPL these days.
Chromium, Rails, Ruby, Python, PHP, Riak, jQuery, SproutCore, basically everything from Apache and Mozilla including Firefox and CouchDB, etc.
There are exceptions like MySQL and MongoDB but they are exactly that, exceptions. Some of them are big ones such as Linux distros, I'm not saying there isn't a lot of existing GPL software out there today. I'd like to see license stats from BitBucket, Google Code, and Github.
There has always been a sizable minority of non-GPL open-source software, such as the BSD community. Not to mention groups like X11, zlib, Perl, and Python who invent their own license for some damned reason.
I haven't noticed any particular recent changes away from the GPL; for example, all of the major DVCS tools (Bazaar, Darcs, Git, Mercurial) use the GPL.
For what it's worth, I prefer to avoid non-GPL software. jQuery and Firefox are at least dual-licensed, so I don't mind using them, but I prefer to avoid Chromium (and especially Chrome) unless necessary.
There's no argument there. However I see more new projects that use MIT/BSD/Apache or similar than GPL. It could just be the projects I come across and/or are interested in, but I keep pretty broad tabs on technology and use various OSs on a daily basis. I suppose if you use Linux most of the time you will see a ton of GPL software relative to other licenses, but if you look at cross-platform and web stuff I see less GPL. Just my observation.
Look not at the status quo, look at the trends.
My non-scientific perception is also that new projects tend to use less restrictive licensing. And I like it.
Well, all current versions of (MRI) Ruby have a Ruby/GPL dual license. All versions starting from 1.9.3 will have a Ruby/BSDL license because of GPLv2/GPLv3 problems.
Chromium, Rails, Ruby, Python, PHP, Riak, jQuery, SproutCore, basically everything from Apache and Mozilla including Firefox and CouchDB, etc.
There are exceptions like MySQL and MongoDB but they are exactly that, exceptions. Some of them are big ones such as Linux distros, I'm not saying there isn't a lot of existing GPL software out there today. I'd like to see license stats from BitBucket, Google Code, and Github.