The ongoing trends we’re seeing today show no signs of letting up. Workloads moving to the cloud, an escalating number of devices accessing applications and data, and the more distributed nature of the workforce have been accelerated by last year’s global health events.
As this year comes to a close, it is a good time to take a look at the trends of open source license usage in 2020 and compare them to previous years. Our research team has collected information from the WhiteSource database, which includes more than 4 million open source packages and 130 million open source files covering over 200 programming languages, to learn which were the most popular open source licenses in 2020.
Even before the pandemic, many companies were undergoing significant transformation as they transitioned to cloud or hybrid architectures and grappled with problems caused by tool sprawl due to the quick adoption of many disparate tools. For some, COVID-19 and the rush to remote work fueled and exacerbated these challenges.
Apple loves bragging about how secure their devices are. Not without reason: there are lots of security features you probably use daily, including code autofill, password reuse auditing, Safari built-in privacy, and many more. Same for developers. For example, Apple doesn't release their source code to app developers for security reasons. And the owners of iOS devices can't modify the code on their phones themselves.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) set a huge precedent in modern digital privacy regulation. We've seen regions throughout the world adopt similar data protection laws in the time since its inception, and the financial liabilities are only part of the story. Customers and users of software products are now savvier than ever when it comes to understanding the importance of data privacy rights.