There is a discussion over on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11577917) about the relative merits of GPL versus other kinds of free and public domain software. I won't enter into that debate. But some of the discussion did get me thinking about the extent of GPLed software versus SQLite.
My question: Are the number of deployed and working instances of *all* GPLed projects less than or greater than the number of deployed and working instances of SQLite? I don't have an answer. I have, of course, phrased this question to maximize the advantage of SQLite. If I had asked which body of software is the most important, or has had the most impact on society, or that is most influential, then I think clearly, unambiguously, the multitude of GPLed projects win over SQLite. No contest. But if you are just counting deployed instances.... Unless I'm overlooking something, Linux is the most-deployed GPLed project. It's on every Android device, after all. But SQLite is also on every Android device, and on every iOS device, and on every Mac and on every Windows10 machine. So SQLite clearly has more deployments than Linux. But are all the other GPLed projects sufficient to make up the gap? Are their other projects with GPL or GPL-like licenses that have the same reach as Linux? Do we count Firefox (using MPL, which is similar to GPL). Chrome does not count, I don't think, because it is proprietary, but Chromium, the non-proprietary subset of Chrome, is mostly GPL. But what is the usage rate of Chromium vs. Chrome? There are countless other GPL projects without which life as we know it would come to an end: valgrind, gcc, bash, to name but a few. But I cannot think of any that have extensive usage outside the geek community, and hence for all their importance, they don't have all that many deployments relative to Linux. So please make your case. Do you think there are more deployments of SQLite in use in the world today? Or more deployments of GPLed software? -- D. Richard Hipp drh at sqlite.org
