I totally understand the reaction. The objection makes sense.

The Distrowatch numbers are clearly nonsense. The biggest reason they are nonsense is because they feed into each other. “Oh hey, I have never heard of MX Linux, I wonder what that is”. Click. And nobody needs to be told what Ubuntu is.

But I full expect the traffic pattern at a website like OSI to be quite different. And what brings people to a license page to begin with?

Anyway, we can see from the results that the methodology is not as flawed as we fear. Because it closely aligns with other sources.

But again, I get the objection. We would have to take these conclusions with a grain of salt and agreement with other sources before basing any decisions on it.

Still, I found it interesting.

Thankfully, we have much better data on license popularity than we do for say programming language popularity, or Linux distribution use for that matter.